Couldn't agree more Michael. It's time to give senior PMs and BAs their due and acknowledge their contributions and future career path.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people think they could be a project manager because the principles of project management are relatively easy to understand. Of course in theory hitting a 3 wood off a tee is easy to do, but that doesn't make us all Tiger Woods does it?

There is a great deal to successful project management as there is to understanding what the role of a business analyst is. In fact acquiring the key business analyst skills are a great deal harder than one might think.

Organisations need to value their good project manager's and business analysts more, otherwise they will never get out of the vicious cycle of failed projects.

Regards

Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com

Okay, so I think I've figured it out.

Project Management gets a bad rap, and this is why I think so. Anyone remember the old "SWOT" analysis? Strenghths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. Okay - in my opinion there are two kinds of people in charge - managers and leaders. Managers "manage" so they "get things done" by working through others, but can handle strengths and weakness, be it individuals, group dynamics, etc. Leaders, however "know what needs to be done" by reading the road ahead. Managers are tactical, leaders are strategic, typically.

So, what I've seen happen is that the typical workplace hasn't really offered much upward mobility for a variety of reasons other than the typical pyramid-type hierarchies that make it hard for the many to "get to the top." But that's by design.

At the same time, we've already gone through a period of eliminating middle-management through previous economic downturns, in the name of efficiency. Hold that thought - it will be revisited.

The only way to move up is to well, get more in touch with the strategy of the organization, versus putting pins in grenades, or writing reports about how many widgets your team can pump out in a day. Those who are in tune with "why" have a shot at leadership, and decision making functions.

For a long time, managers, leaders, project managers, supervisors, ubermensch, et al, all had direct reports, and that person in charge had to complete a certain said workload with what they had, for better or worse. At the end of the day, "I need it done by this week" was communicated from a leader to a direct report.

But things got complicated. The skills of the knowledge worker became more and more diverse and complex, so we needed to augment direct reporting teams with consultants or subject matter experts, either in whole or in part.

So, a new "class" of worker was designed. This group does all the things that managers don't like to do that take up a good part of the day, freeing them up to do what will give them better exposure in the organization's strategy, while taking credit for the more tactical accomplishments of the team.

The problem is that it's just daunting to have to deal with all that personnel - internal and external, and manage costs, time, scheduling, delivery, stakeholders, etc.

Thus the Project Manager was invented. This solves a few problems. Now LEADERS can emerge, and shift "execution-level" management to PM's, who assign and manage internal and external resources that do not report to them, and simply aggregate all that information into a simple status report.

A good leader can free themselves of day-to-day management, get a foot into the door of corporate strategic direction, and decision-making, while execution of plans take place, in someone else's hands.

So basically, by taking the "thinking" out of traditional management, but extracting all the credit-taking advantages, a leader will get the best of both worlds.

In short, guess what just happened? Yup - you guessed it...Project Management is simply a replacement for all the "middle management" that was reduced in the past. It has simply been rebranded.

Even worse, it has become commoditized, no different than other outsource-able rote tasks. Why? PMP, and other certifications make it possible to create a Project Management "cog" role that can be plugged in and out. Once there's standardization, watch out. Next thing comes centralization (sometimes), and next comes outsourcing. It's the law of efficiency, regardless of industry.

So why are PM's unhappy? They have come to realize that they are not on any career path, as they are not part of the ruling hierarchy. There strategic input is not needed, nor really solicited. It is a MANAGEMENT task, not a leadership role.

As stated in so many books on leadership, if you aren't including leaders of all levels, all you will get is MANAGEMENT. Then you only have yourself to blame for those who only look at the strengths and weaknesses of today, versus the opportunities and threats that will shape your organization's future.

Speaking of which, the recent trend in Program Management has shown that similar to cellular automata, another "split" has occurred...

Program Management is now getting rid of those mundane nasty aggregations of various projects, and dole it out to yet another level of "management" again, while the leader in charge has yet one more thing off their plate, leaving only a strategically-focused role, that is free to

So what did we learn? Something we already know. "It's good to be the king."

Any truly successful project begins with a strong BA who doesn't just take notes, but engages the business team / clients into real discussions on their requirements.

Far to many times we start with a powerpoint with a few slides describing the business requirements. Then we immediately want to jump into "agile development" starting the project and writing code.

Agile development still needs to start from a strong base set of requirements. The BA role is the key to interpret and work with the business folks, capturing their real needs and relating that to the technical requirements for the development team. Start with the story board then move into Business Process Modeling.

The BA role is not just at the start of the project. You cannot have your BAs being the note takers, "capturing" the requirements to kick off the project and move them onto the next project. They need to remain engaged throughout the process. Constant clarification of the requirements for the developers, reviewing prototypes with the business teams, etc. A good BA relates well with both the technical and business community. They help refine the business requirements, identify the latent needs, help develop a better business process, review the test scripts/approach, help triage the testing defects, perform acceptance testing, etc.

They are looked upon as being an integral part of both the business team and the development team...not just the note taker.