PM&BA – The DYNAMIC DUO – Key Messages

By Prassede Colombo , President IIBA® Italy Chapter, Partner PMProgetti

I’d like to share some key messages discussed during the event organized by the IIBA® Italy Chapter and PMI®-NIC (about

400 participants).

Business Analysis is the practice of enabling change. BA competencies are key for understanding business problems and

opportunities recommending solutions that enable the organizations to achieve their goals in the context of the

requirements. Business Analyst should be considered as “Change Agent, Facilitator, Analyzer, Advisor, Leader” for the

Requirements in order to guarantee the Solution alignment to the Business Value, before, during and after the project.

When the Business Requirements are clear and

the BA approach is applied, the Project Manager

can better address the project work in the right

direction. During the project, the BA is

responsible for the requirements, traceability and

solution validation, reporting to the PM, who is

accountable for the project. When the project

closes the BA is accountable for the assessment

of the performances and acts for improvements.

Business Analysis increases project value

through a better starting, the prioritization, the

discovery of new requirements on time and the

increase of understanding among stakeholders,

the improvement of the change process. It decreases project costs documenting better the requirements and reducing

the rework, shortening the project, reducing in stakeholder wasted time, discovering more cost-effective solutions.

The PM/BA should be a peer-to-peer relationship. It’s crucial to clarify the RACI matrix at the beginning and to assign a

strong Project Manager and a strong Business Analyst for the success of the project.

A current practice, as reported by Telecom Italia, Vodafone, BV Tech, NIS is to have a unique person as PM and BA.

This practice it could be risky and it’s not easy to perform. If you are a Strong PM-Weak BA, requirements could be

rushed, some may be missed, rework could be needed late causing customer unsatisfaction. If you are a Weak PM-Strong

BA, you could dedicate too much time developing requirements, project could fall behind schedule and “scope creep”

occurs.

Organizations need to reach the awareness of the required competencies to achieve good performance in Business

Analysis and Project Management. They need to assess competencies and the IIBA® Competence Model is helpful.

In the organizations there are many unaware Business Analyst and it should be understood how better engage them in the

projects. To achieve this, some organizations are developing Center of Competencies for BA, either are staffing strong BA,

or empowering the best PM.

The solution requires a good Enterprise Analysis depending on the business need and the AS IS Status (context, size of

projects, existing roles, organization structure, the Project Management and Business Analysis Maturity).

Keep in mind that Business Analysis is a profession as the Project Management is. If you want to maintain the two

professions at high level you could compromise the result of one of them. This is the challenge…

PM&BA Mastering the Requirements – Michele Maritato , IIBA Board Director, Partner PMProgetti

Requirements are gathered and managed iteratively throughout the project, at different levels and with a different focus.

The best practices of the Business Analysis discipline suggest that for an effective management of requirements, the

project should follow a “schema” that begins with the identification of the Business Requirements and progress with the

Stakeholder, Solution and Transition Requirements (BABOK® Guide ). This categorization has also been recently adopted

by the PMBOK® Guide and it provides the Project Managers with a very powerful frame for collecting and managing the

project requirements. Keep in mind that early requirements are manifested even before the project is initiated, then

during the project and eventually also after the project is closed: the Project Manager must have the capability to keep the

project linked to this continuous “stream” of requirements, if the project intends to deliver high value to the business. So

it’s crucial to put together BA and PM approach. It was presented a framework for mastering the requirements

throughout a project. The approach described below can be applied to all requirements and consists of 5 Stages.

Preparing – Requirements Management Plan, Vito Savi no - Manager at SGS Banco Popolare

In the initial phase of a project we have to define specific rules and processes needed to better organize the collection and

management of requirements. These processes, that include the prioritization, the traceability, the change management

and the requirements attributes definition, represent themselves the “Requirements Management Plan”.

A good Requirements Management Plan will help the Business Analyst having a clear picture of the situation and taking

the right actions without distractions and deviations from the real goal, avoiding the unhappy experience of “Little Red

Riding Hood” with the cunning and hungry wolf in the famous tale.

Preparing – Prioritize and Trace Requirements, Luig i Pantarotto - IIBA Italy Chapter VP Marketing, Business Advisor at SAS

In the ICT World Gartner says that Requirements Management must confront new disruptive external forces: Generation Y

will make in the future the 'Buy' paradigm preferred over 'Make' and a gap in the ability of measuring, aligning and

managing Business Value is emerging. Prioritization is key to focus efforts to achieve the maximum Business Value.

Lessons learned are discussed and a prioritizing by consensus exercise is performed with the audience, using the Voting

technique. But in a world of complex Business Solutions, Tracing is key as well, in order to trace back solutions

requirements to original or new business requirements. The example is from a Marketing Business Solution, where a

simple coverage matrix allows tracing back of solution requirements to different possible business requirements.

Eliciting the Requirements, Luigi Rega - IIBA Italy Chapter Secretary, Consultant at Reply

Elicitation is a very creative and challenging activity, necessary to “evoke”, “draw out”, “bring to light” the requirements

from all the stakeholders. Indeed, if done badly, it may add sensitive risks to projects. That’s why PM&BA shall work

together to involve the stakeholders properly, and the elicitation shall not be limited to just gathering requirements, but

shall engage the stakeholders proactively. Several techniques are described in the BABOK® Guide: among them,

prototyping can be used successfully to stimulate elicitation of requirements in early phases of projects, especially if the

BA gives the right importance to feedbacks. Also, requirements elicitation is essential to avoid the common enemy of

PM&BA: the scope creep.

Approval Requirements, Gaetano Lombardi, Program Ma nager at Ericsson

Many organizations have a formal process of "sign-off" or approval where the customer or project sponsor formally agrees

to the requirements that have been captured. In the case study it is presented how the approval of requirements can be

linked to business process, in the specific product development process using a gate stage model, and therefore ensuring

the dynamic of business decisions as requirements very likely will still change after sign-off. In that perspective, project

teams must adapt requirements change procedure that stakeholders can fall back or when indeed requirements change.

Naturally and then the link to business decision process, the project manager shall explain the impacts on project’s

schedule and budget to the stakeholders to get a new approval. In the case study and because of the inherent

requirements dynamic, it has been presented the advantage to use agile methods and agile project life cycle instead of the

classical waterfall model. Agile methods in fact acknowledge requirements change and allow managing the scope much

flexibly therefore having a quicker turn-around of requirements than standard techniques.

See all the presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/IIBA-IT/tag/pm-bafeb2014