The Business Analyst Times has a lot of interesting articles. One was the PM/BA rolled into one thread from Robert K. Wysocki which drew a lot of fire and has six articles so far, with a lot of arguments going back and forth.
personally, I believe that the Project Manager and the Business Analyst roles should not be dumped on one person, both roles require a lot of work, both has a different view of the project, and a day has only 24 hours in it. This latest problem is frequently forgotten by people and then they wonder why the previously so good BA or PM suddenly turned into an awful, useless one. Nonetheless, companies try to do it all the time for some reason.
The other thread, which is more interesting for me at the moment is Glenn R. Brûl?s Getting Back to Basics series. The series has four chapters – so far – and are pretty interesting:
- First Fundamental: Understanding Overall Business Goals
- Second Fundamental: Creating a Common Vocabulary
- Third Fundamental – Identifying Your Sources
- Choosing Elicitation Techniques
Note, that to read the articles you have to register. While it can be inconvenient, if you are interested in the topic you should anyway, so no big loss there.
Before anyone starts to wonder, no I will not reiterate his points here, nor will I oppose them. Basically I just want to urge you to go and read. If you are or likely will be responsible of starting a project either or on the client or the delivery site, go and read it. It does worth your time.
All I want to put here as an addition is that it will not work at all if you send out a handful people to gather requirements, each talking with different department, different people and then trying to merge the results.
First of all, no one will see how the whole works. Second, there will be a whole lot of unanswered and what’s worst, unasked questions. Departments interact. Departments have an effect on each other’s processes. Logistics on customer service. Document management on manufacturing.
And you will never, ever see these interdependencies because they will go unasked and so unanswered.