(Professional Business Analyst Training organisation)

Project Management Basics

Project is a piece of work with certain deadlines and budget associated to achieve specific requirements. Project management always plays an important role in every project because the project success lies in it. The purpose of project management is nothing but proper planning, organizing resources and control activities.

Depending upon the project you may have to handle various steps for making a project successful. One of the critical factors for project success lies in proper planning.Project management keeps the things clear and efficient; it also helps the team members to understand their responsibilities in an appropriate way, thus reducing the threats of the project.

Project management process varies from industry to industry; however, the basic phases of project management are:1) Initiation2) Planning3) Project execution and control4) Project Closure

Traditional BA (Waterfall) Agile BA

Requirements are documented in Use

Cases,Business Requirements, Functional

requirements, UI Specifications, Business Rules.

Requirements are documented in Epics, User

Stories and optionally Business (or Essential) Use

cases.

Focuses on completeness of requirement and

spends time in ensuring the requirement is

unambiguous and has all the details.

Focuses on understanding the problem and being

the domain expert so that s/he can answer

questions from the development team swiftly and

decisively.

Focuses on getting a ‘sign off’ on the requirements.

Focuses on ensuring the requirements meet the

currentbusiness needs, even if it requires

updating them.

Often there is a wall between the BA/Business and

the Development team.

Agile BA (Often called as Product Owner) is part of

the team.

Tends to dictate solutions.

Has to remain in the problem domain, leaving the

development team ‘space’ to explore different

solutions.

Long turnaround. Quick turnaround.

Focus on what the requirements document said. In

other words, output (Artifact) is a well written

thorough requirements document.

Focus on the functionality of the developed

software. In other words, output (Artifact) is the

software that meets thebusiness needs.

Project initiation phase tells how to initiate a project by defining its purpose, scope and justification for implementing the project and defining solution for the project.

To be more specific, business cases are written and feasibility study is performed in this phase.

Project Planning: The most crucial phase for project manager is planning a project, wherein one has to make some guess about available resources and various equipment's needed in order to finish the project successfully.

In this phase of project planning budget estimation and deadlines are defined.

Project execution and control Project: Execution simply means comparing the project status to the actual plan and deliverables are physically built. Each deliverable will be constructed where project manager will monitor and control the deliverables. For controlling deliverables status reports are considered. Project managers may need to adjust schedules or do what is necessary to keep the project on track.

Project Closure: This phase involves releasing the final deliverables to the customer and getting approval from the customer. Projects should be formally closed by writing a summary and handing over project documentation to the customer, releasing project resources and communicating project closure to all stakeholders.

The final step is to go for a Post Implementation Review to identify the level of project success and note any lessons learned for future projects.