Doing Business in Real Time
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What to Do about the Sorry State of Project Managers and Business Analysts
Give senior people an opportunity to deliver value on projects
The status of Project Managers and Business Analysts has sunk so low because we are confused about the skills required and the value that can delivered by people in those roles. We are confused because each of these roles has both junior and senior positions and we’ve focused too much on what happens in the junior positions. Senior people in these roles get frustrated and leave so we don’t often see the value they can deliver.
There usually isn’t a career advancement path for people once they learn the basic skills of project management and business analysis. So senior people in these roles get stuck in low level positions and don’t have the opportunity to show what they can really do. Everybody looses. Experienced PMs and BAs are marginalized, projects suffer, and companies who carry out system development projects don’t get the results they want. We need to come up with new titles for senior people in the PM and BA roles to differentiate them and signify the value they can deliver.
New Titles to Differentiate Senior from Junior
Deliberately or not, the title of project manager has come to denote a junior level person. Once this person has mastered basic PM skills (PMBOK etc.) and also gotten good at the interpersonal and negotiating skills that go with project management, they should be promoted and called by a different title. Along with basic PM skills and interpersonal skills, senior project management people should also have some experience as a developer and/or as a business analyst to give them a well rounded understanding of what happens on development projects and enable them to be problem solvers and not just problem reporters. I propose senior project managers get the title of “System Builder”
A System Builder is a person who has been there and done it when it comes to running development projects. They need 10+ years experience with IT projects, and in those 10+ years they should have been developers so they understand the issues related to writing and testing code. They should have also been business analysts so they understand the vagaries related to working with business people and defining system requirements. This experience along with mastering the junior PM skills earns them their senior status. Let’s formally recognize people like this and put them in charge of running projects; success rates will climb.
A business analyst has also come to denote a junior level person who takes notes during meetings and does low level tasks related to defining and documenting system requirements. Once they have proven their competence in basic analyst skills (BABOK etc.) and have gotten good at the interpersonal skills of working with business and technical people they should be promoted and called by a different title. I suggest the title of “Business System Designer”.
Business System Designers understand both business and technical issues related to designing application systems. Business System Designers have 5+ years experience and they understand process mapping, data modeling and UI design. They also know that analysis is just half of their job - synthesis is the other half. They are able to create designs that synthesize user requirements gotten from analysis into coherent and easy to understand systems. Business System Designers express system UI designs as a storyboard of screens that show users how they will interact with the system. Business System Designers also have the people skills to present their designs plus the maturity to listen to business users and take feedback and make modifications so users
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