You're sitting in a project kickoff meeting. Today's topics of discussion: How should we get started? And what happens next?
As a business analyst, your voice is a critical part of this conversation. In fact, your suggestions could help the project succeed or fail. The more you know about the project management frameworks available to you, the more helpful you can be as you guide this new project over the finish line.
What Role Will You Play as a BA?
Successful projects require coordinated teams working with detailed requirements in a structured environment. As a business analyst, you'll play a key role in developing those elements.
As the project moves forward, you might:
Conduct research. You'll craft user stories, develop technical requirements and gather feedback during testing.
Lead your team. In some companies, a BA’s duties overlap with those of product owners. In such cases, you will need to know everything about what the product should do, who it's made for and how its success is measured.
Craft schedules. You might set the pace of development and ensure that the team stays on track.
When it comes to new projects, every company has a slightly different role for a BA to tackle. All of them involve some kind of schedule and deliverable. Understanding how project management methodologies work can help you do your job, writes Moira Alexander, founder of PMWorld 360 Magazine. The more you know, the better you can help your company choose the right framework for the project at hand.
What Framework Is Right for Your Project?
Project management frameworks do more than help you set milestones. They also help you understand how to structure your team and assign roles, writes Paul Naybor, business development director at Parallel Project Training. Each framework has benefits and drawbacks, and your role may shift a bit depending on which one you choose.
Waterfall: What Roles do BAs Play?
Waterfall projects move sequentially. One task doesn't begin until the prior task is completed. These projects often involve external stakeholders who must approve team decisions at each stage.
Kate Eby at Smartsheet describes how Waterfall is a traditional form of project management in which everything moves in a predictable sequence.
If your company chooses this project management framework, your role might involve research, condensation and communication. You'll have a large part to play at the beginning of the project, Mary K. Pratt and Sarah K. White write for CIO, as you'll be busy gathering user requirements for your developers.
Agile: What Roles do BAs Play?
Agile projects are fast and flexible, and the needs of the project always come first. That means these projects don't rely on a formal structure, set teams and defined roles. If the product demands something new, the team responds on the fly.
Agile projects don't work like other projects, and that's both a benefit and a risk. Bob Kantor, founder of the Kantor Consulting Group, writes that Agile projects are like experiments, and sometimes, they prove the hypothesis incorrect. Forget that fundamental dynamic, and you're running a traditional project under a different name only.
As a BA on an Agile project, you might gather up data about the market segment you're hoping to reach, and you might analyze the work as it moves forward to ensure you're solving the right problem in the right way. If you see a discrepancy, you can guide the team to the right solution.
Agile teams are small but intensely collaborative. Choose this project type, and you'll work very closely with your peers while interacting with external stakeholders sporadically.
Scrum: What Roles do BAs Play?
Scrum projects are quite similar to their Agile counterparts, but they rely on well-defined roles, teams and schedules.
Scrum relies on two- or four-week sprints, followed by testing. At the end of each sprint, stakeholders huddle to determine what happens next, and a new cycle begins. This methodology relies on a Scrum Master, and as a BA you're qualified to tackle that role. As business analyst blogger Joe Barrios writes, BAs must “solve problems and remove obstacles.” That's just what a Scrum Master does.
In a Scrum project, you might:
Schedule daily, short meetings to keep the team on track.
Set sprint deadlines.
Gather feedback at the end of each sprint.
Maintain a log of all the requirements for your viable product, including functions, features and enhancements.
Lean: What Roles do BAs Play?
The Lean project management framework was born of the need to eliminate excess steps and complexity from product development. Rather than rushing to develop a project with plenty of features, hordes of sign-offs and siloed teams, companies move toward building a stripped-down product on a quicker timeline.
Defining value is a critical part of a Lean project, and value is determined by the customer (not your team). Murtaza Khalil at Kissflow explains that teams must evaluate their work continuously, and they often use surveys, polls or interviews to keep the customer's voice in the conversation. As a BA, you might gather and analyze that feedback for your team.
In addition, the analysis you'll do — of both the market and potential customers — gives you a deep understanding of what the product should do and how it should work. That can help you prevent feature creep as production moves forward.
Evaluate the Framework for Success
A successful BA will understand the various project management methodologies available. When you've mastered those key concepts, you can put them to use in almost any environment in which you'll work. But analysis is required at project kickoff.
"What’s important is to understand the project, its goals and objectives, and what its challenges are, and to pick, choose, and use those right parts of project management accordingly," writes Connie Emerson, assistant teaching professor at Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies.
Make that happen with research and analysis. When the project begins, think about:
Potential size. Is your company working on a massive product that could touch every single department? Or is this a small tweak to an existing product or service? "Less complex projects are typically good candidates for methodologies such as waterfall, where requirements are clear from the beginning and there is less opportunity for business requirements to change significantly," writes Kevin Senior, director at Glasscubes.
Your team. Do you have plenty of stakeholders involved? Or are you dealing with a small subset of people? Project frameworks like Waterfall allow bigger teams a voice in important conversations. But smaller teams might tackle collaboration in weekly Scrum meetings instead. BAs must be skilled communicators who can describe how their choice impacts the team as a whole, and you might need to explain that impact to others, too.
Your deadline. When is your projected release date? Waterfall projects need a longer lead time, while software projects might need the quicker pace of Agile. As a BA, you might be in charge of both developing and enforcing the schedule, and some frameworks require a great deal of scheduling effort. If you implement a structure like Lean with plenty of feedback loops, be prepared to manage that complex workflow from start to finish.
Personal preference. It's OK to have your own opinions about which frameworks are efficient. Plenty of BAs do. Tim Morrow, business analyst consultant at Skyline Technologies, says, for example, that his work on Agile Scrum teams has led to his biggest successes. If you feel strongly about a framework, add your voice to the discussion.
Don't be afraid to experiment to meet the needs of your company and your product. "Methodologies can be approached rigidly, as a discipline without any deviations, or more à la carte, where a hybrid of two or more are used to respond to the unique aspects of a project," writes William Malsam, content director at ProjectManager.com.
But ensure that your team understands the schedule, the rules and the guidelines you plan to follow. Don't build in so much flexibility that your team isn't sure what happens next.
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