PM Skills for BAs-Planning, Estimating, and Controlling BA Work
Robin F. Goldsmith, JD helps organizations get the right results right by advising and training business and systems professionals on REAL requirements, project management and leadership, risk-based Proactive Software Quality Assurance™ and Proactive Testing™, REAL ROI™, metrics, outsourcing, and process improvement. Subject expert for IIBA’s BABOK® v2, he is an author of the book, Discovering REAL Business Requirements for Software Project Success, and the forthcoming book, Cut Creep: Write Right Agile User Story and Acceptance Test Requirements Right.
Is poor project management impacting your effectiveness? What can you do about it? How’s that working out? Historically, Business Analysts (BAs) and Project Managers (PMs) focus on and are trained in separate skill sets. BAs focus on requirements definition, whereas PMs concentrate on budgets, schedules, resources, and tasks. Having both PM and BA present on a project presumably enables covering all bases with more efficient specialized division of labor, and sometimes each is explicitly precluded from the other’s turf.
In fact, though, PMs can’t and shouldn’t do all the project managing needed; and consequently BAs often lack enough time or resources to perform effective business analysis. Instead, each project role, including BAs, needs to take some of the responsibility for managing their own activities and cannot rely on just the PM to plan and control project work. The difficulty often starts with inadequately identifying the BA work actually needed and estimating the work’s resources, effort, and duration. While these all seem like PM responsibilities, too few PMs understand how to do them; and unfortunately, too few BAs know either. This interactive session, helps BAs know better than the PM what BA work needs to be done, what it will take to accomplish it, and how to make sure it happens.
Effective business analysis relies on applying proficiency with skills such as eliciting, analyzing, drafting, communicating, and controlling requirements-related information. However, while such proficiency is necessary for success, it’s not sufficient. The missing piece involves similarly proficient application of project management skills-planning, organizing, directing, and controlling resources, tasks, budgets and schedules. This interactive session provides awareness, which is the first step toward effectiveness.
Learning Objectives
- Identify how ineffective project management impacts BAs
- Distinguish project management responsibilities of PM, BA, and both
- Relate responsibilities to Agile and traditional project structures
- Develop a sample Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of typical key BA tasks
- Identify relevant ways to estimate the tasks’ effort, duration, and schedule
- Apply methods to control on-time, in-budget completion
Who Should Attend
This webinar is for business analysts, project managers, and other business, project, and systems professionals who participate in or depend on results of projects to help your organization deliver customer and stakeholder business value. Concepts and techniques also are relevant to developer/engineer, QA/tester, operations or other specialist roles. You’re probably already involved in or planning to become involved in Agile projects; but the course’s concepts and techniques also can be applied by those in more traditional projects.
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$200.00
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