Business Analyst – Project Manager (BAPM) – Emerging Role in IT industry

As any industry evolves gradually it brings along with it new exciting roles and opportunities. One such role which is emerging in the IT industry is BA – PM. It can be said that the dual role of BA PM which might have introduced due to budget constraint has now looked as a serious option in industry due to tremendous advantage it can offer to a project.

Project Manager:

As defined by Jim Lewis “The person who has total responsibility for ensuring that the project is completed on time, within Budget, within scope and desired performance achieved.”

Business Analyst:

BABOK defines BA as “a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization and to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals”.

So the question is should BA’s and PM’s role be played by different individuals or should we prefer BAPM as a single role?

Every project is associated with three attributes – Time, Budget and Scope.

Sponsor always expects some business value behind implementing any Project. The project is said to be successful not when it is completed within required time and budget but when it has achieved required business values. So if BA and PM are different individuals and are specialized only in their respective roles, BA is aware of the Business Value attached with the project while PM is just aware about the functionalities to be developed and target time and resources allocated for the same. PM will try to complete the assigned project within the target attributes and in order to do that sometimes might compromise/ ignore certain functionalities which might help to achieve business values but might require additional duration or budget. If the same is handled by individual having both skills of BA and PM will discuss such points with stakeholders whenever they are encountered and if required make sure that extra duration/budget gets approved by the sponsor.

So when is the sponsor/client happy? When project completed on time/budget but not fulfilling the required business value OR project which was delayed but satisfying business values? This explains importance of BAPM Role over individuals performing specialized BA or PM roles.

BA-PM Roles and its Variants:

In an organization, BA –PM role can be any one of below:

• Business Analyst (equipped with PM skills) and vice-versa:
• Preferred for Huge/Large Projects
• In This type, two separate individuals perform tasks for PM and BA respectively but both must be equipped with BAPM skills.
• Business Analyst – Project Manager (BAPM):
• Preferred in small projects (In terms of scope/time/budget).
• Single individual performs dual role of both BA and PM.

Advantage:

Advantages that a BAPM role offers in Project Lifecycle is explained in following image

From the above discussion I can conclude that BAPM role is extremely useful to avoid gaps in understanding - What needs to be developed? And why it needs to be developed?

About Author:

Saurabh Kane is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: saurabh.k@spluspl.com