by Valentin Kouprine, PhD, PEng, PMP, Daron Kinsey, MIEAust, Randy McMeekin, PEng
The engineering and construction industry is transforming from a document-driven to a digitally driven sector. Besides the physical assets delivered, managing project data and information is essential to providing better quality deliverables, cutting costs and controlling risks.
How are you with uncertainty? Do you revel in the possibilities or crave closure? Agile methods have a very different approach to requirements management that some people find empowering...and others find infuriating.
Organizational politics are inevitable--and cause the workforce to react in a way inconsistent with your project objectives. You will need to use special tactics to realign the workforce behavior.
How do we define the business analysis role? What are the competencies required? Are such individuals always called business analysts? Without having clarity on such topics, how will we ever expect an uptake of the business analysis profession? Enter the Business Analysis Ecosystem.
Project managers play a critical role in helping organizations close the gap between expectations and achievement, according to a new report from Project Management Institute. Successful practices include engaging cross-functional teams and keeping business owners informed about benefits-related issues.
In a shift from traditional on-time and on-budget metrics, project managers increasingly collaborate with business analysts to measure business value as a key metric. Adopting a model based on feature analysis and determining feature business value sets the stage for results-driven, high-value project delivery.
In the world of IT, each project comes with a different set of expectations and requirements that make everyone nervous about estimating cost, time and level of effort. Estimations based on a mature estimation model (function points) are more likely to be successful than projects that are estimated ad hoc, based on expert judgment alone. Function points translate all project functionalities into equivalent efforts. Combined with a well-defined process, they serve as a powerful tool for accurate estimations.
The benefits of outsourcing also come with various challenges—often because the vendor will execute the work with a project mindset that has limited visibility and never really looks at it from the product mindset. Agile can help instill the right outlook.
Agile and Design Thinking, two leading trends in project management, follow an iterative approach and emphasize the importance of the team. But it is their differences that offer great potential when combined as complementary tools for complex problem-solving, customer interaction and value delivery.
The best way to improve project outcomes is to improve requirements analysis. But as programs grow increasingly complex, organizations must go beyond methodologies to develop and broaden the capabilities of their requirements analysts, starting with these 10 skills.