Business Process Analysis

You see it all the time.  A company tries to take someone who is really not trained to be a project manager, nor do they even want to be a project manager, and they say today you are a project manager.  Often this happens with engineers and most engineers want to be engineers, not project managers.

This happens when a company doesn’t truly understand and respect the role of a project manager.  They tend to think that projects basically handle themselves and somebody just needs to spend 10% of their time doing some paperwork and business process analysis.  This is far from the truth.

I actually happen to be one of those rare project managers that actually have degrees in both business and electronics engineering.  I personally think it serves me well if only to keep engineers from bullshitting me.  However, I still chose to be a project manager and trained accordingly.

That said, I can see this movement happening again in another area of the organizational chart.  It is bad enough that many project manager descriptions say they want a project manager with 20 years of coding experience (that’s an engineer btw), but now they are trying to take business analysts and make them into project managers.  They are not the same.

Don’t get me wrong.  They share similar skills and even I am a certified Business Analyst, but business analysts are not project managers.

Now, business analysts do have a role on the project team and they do work with project managers, but, again, they are not project managers.  However, business analysts traditionally make less than project managers so I can only assume that many companies have the bright idea of getting someone cheaper to be their project manager.  This is a bad plan from the start since you generally get what you pay for.

In fact, performing business process analysis is one of the core responsibilities of the business analyst along with explaining what the customer needs and confirming that they get it.  They are responsible for defining and verifying the final output not only delivering it.

Now, this is no small role by any means.  Often the customer doesn’t know how to define his needs and requirements so that a project team can understand them and deliver them.  Equally, it is important to lead the way in showing the customer, either internal or external, that the requirements were in fact met according to the project and the project is indeed completed.

In the end, that’s how it goes.  Somebody is always trying to cut corners and save costs and ultimately doesn’t understand what they are doing, so they create a bigger mess that costs them even more money.  Unfortunately, the people that are usually in charge of these decisions are not trained to make them.  However, this is the corporate world and we must learn to work within it.  That said, it also means that we have an obligation to train up, so that people who are not trained stop trying to put square pegs in round holes in hopes of convincing the knowledgeable that it is a brilliant idea.

Your path to business success.

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