Don’t you loathe it when somebody tells you ‘You will never complete this task – your team will betray you and fail their work and your assurance will lead you the wrong way!’ Suppose that everybody’s pleased to know that such a statement is false and everything is in our arms and the goal is to customize workflow process in a proper way to achieve results we planned.
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While Agile emphasizes an approach to software development that is more adaptive to changing requirements and enables more interaction between the development team and clients or stakeholders, it goes without saying that even software testing has to shape up along these Agile principles. Therefore, unlike Waterfall, where integration testing, functional testing and user acceptance testing (UAT) take place only when the deliverable service/product starts getting a demonstrable form, which typically could be as late as the last quarter of the entire project lifecycle, Agile proposes all aspects of testing (unit, functional, integration and user-acceptance) and the involvement of the customer at a very early stage in the project lifecycle.
But, have you ever been in a situation where you adopted Agile development methodology and your project schedule was slipping because the customer-representatives were not performing UAT or providing feedback fast enough? If yes, then the remainder of this passage might provide you with a probable solution.
Some critics might blame the schedule slippage because of delayed action from customer-representatives on lack of commitment to Agile on the part of involved stakeholders. Some might even say that it is lack of understanding of Agile methodology on the part of the project manager. But from my understanding such situations may arise because it’s not always possible for the customer to provide dedicated resources for testing and collaborating with the development team, and yet the client wants to go the Agile way. Often the client ends-up providing subject matter experts (SMEs) who have to take up the responsibilities of testing and providing feedback in addition to their day-to-day activities. To keep up with the true spirit of Agile, it will only be apt if the continuous user testing and feedback process can be adapted so that it doesn’t overload the customer representatives.
To illustrate the solution for such a problem let us consider a typical Agile scenario. Let us assume that the development team is working in 2-week iterations. So these 2 weeks (10 business days) will be packed with design, development, unit testing, integration testing and UAT. Let us say that last 2 of the 10 days are assigned to UAT. If the customer representatives fail to complete their testing and provide their input within these 2 days, the development team cannot have a complete plan for the next iteration. Thus the delay from the previous iteration has overflowed into the upcoming iteration. If this happens a few more times, it can snowball into unmanageable schedule slippage. And the project manager will soon have to start the juggling act of balancing the schedule, the scope, the resources, etc.
To counter this problem, we had devised the Develop n Test n-1 approach. While the development team is developing iteration n, the customer would be carrying out UAT on iteration n-1. Going back to our earlier example, our 2-week iterations would now only contain design, development, unit testing and integration testing. UAT is isolated and moved to the next iteration. Assume that the development team has just released the 1st iteration. When the development team commences work on iteration 2, the customer commences testing of iteration 1. When the development team is ready with the release of iteration 2, the UAT is complete on iteration 1. The results and feedback from testing of iteration 1 along with the originally time-boxed requirements for iteration 3 become the new requirements for iteration 3. As the development team commences work on iteration 3, the customer starts testing iteration 2. The progress can be depicted in a chart as shown below.
This approach has two significant advantages:
The customer gets the entire span of iteration for UAT.
The development team does not have to wait on customer feedback to start planning and development of the subsequent iteration.
Working within the constraints and overcoming limitations can be possible with such simple, yet innovative and adaptive changes in various phases of software development. After all, continuous improvement, adaptation, increased interaction with customer, and simplicity are some of the key principles of the Agile manifesto.
Iteration released for testing Testing result and feedback
Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Iteration 4
Development Iteration released for testing
Client UAT Testing result and feedback
Obviously, Agile demands a lot of commitment from all involved stakeholders. A customer-representative, who has previously worked only with Waterfall, will especially notice the additional time that he/she has to put in throughout the project development. He/she has to be involved in UAT right from the first iterative release. During the projects that I managed for the past 5 years, I observed that almost always the customer is unwilling or unable to dedicate full-time resources to carry-out UAT and provide feedback to the development team, and yet they want to go the Agile way. Therefore, mostly customer-representatives have to fulfil multiple roles, and fit testing and feedback responsibility in their other day-to-day activities.
These are the drag years of an economy hovering at 10% unemployment. You are a very qualified PMP certified Project Manager who has been managing projects for 10+ years but now are unemployed. Not your fault. The local economy is tough, the hiring freezes and the budget deferrals at the top local employers is hurting. Along comes a call from a recruiter for this Project Manager/Business Analyst role. They want someone who can do both and are unwilling to really describe what the role may warrant except for standard language such as “Manage projects in a matrix organization, Familiarity with SDLC methodology, Excellent oral and written communication skills, Willing to travel”. You very well know where this job description has come from and it is definitely not from the hiring manager. The pay rate is 15% less than what you were making as a PM, but it is higher than what a junior PM or BA would make.
Should you submit your resume?
You can be disgusted by the recruiters and hiring managers who continue to converge the roles of a Project Manager and a Business Analyst. An experienced PMP certified Project Manager is likely to not take such a role description very seriously. But an experienced Business Analyst trying to gradually move into a Project Manager role may think of this as an excellent opportunity. You don’t want to lose this job opportunity. What do you do?
Let’s think about it for a while.
1. Why are hiring managers looking for such roles?
2. Are there even common functions that a PM and a BA perform? Or are the roles mutually exclusive?
The hiring manager’s perspective
There could be a lot of reasons why hiring managers advertise PM/BA roles. The role that the hiring manager has in mind could be a real 50:50 split. It is possible that the hiring manager may just not know enough OR they may really want a PM but may not be willing to pay a premium to get a true Project Management practitioner.
But I believe that the most likely reason that such roles are even fathomed is that the hiring managers just do not know that much about an upcoming need or project to accurately project whether they need a BA or a PM. They usually know that they have budget for 2 headcount and that they have to get a certain business priority accomplished. They will also know to a lesser extent that here may be data analysis involved, there may a business process change, all responsibilities of a Business Analyst and that there will definitely be a need for someone to drive the project and monitor, classically suited for a Project Manager. Quite often, they do not sit down and say, I really need 1.25 people to do business analysis and 0.75 people to do project management or vice versa. One would need a lot of clarity on the upcoming tasks to be able to do that. So what does the hiring manager do? She asks the recruiter to put out a requirement for a PM/BA and she defers the decision to the interview stage. The phone screen, which is essentially intended to determine if the candidate really has the credentials to accomplish the task at hand, turns into an impersonal questioning round and unless the candidate is really off the mark, usually results into an in-person interview. At the in-person interview stage, the role description and the true skills-set need goes on the back burner and the focus is on compatibility with the team, personal skills, etc. and there you have it. The real question of what skills-set the position really needed and whether the candidate actually can fulfill that role, is quite often not scrutinized because it is assumed that the Project Manager and the Business Analyst roles are quite similar, if not completely interchangeable.
Project Manager and Business Analyst: Mutually Exclusive or not?
It is true to some extent that a project manager often performs roles that one may traditionally expect a business analyst to do. For example, sending out meeting invites for requirement gathering sessions or functional specification reviews or QA scenario reviews. Depending on the organization and project, project managers sometimes also set up discussions for Business Acceptance Testing to get all stakeholders to buy into the process, the strategy and the mechanics of execution.
On a similar note, Business Analysts sometimes drive schedules, initiate risk assessments and engage with stakeholders, functions that are traditionally associated with a Project Manager.
As you can see these are all a lot of zones where business analysts and project managers play together. In my experience, I have noted that it is more common in the business functions such as sales, marketing, operations and less common in the technical functions such as Infrastructure and IT. This is true and makes sense since the technical functions typically have a harder skill set while business teams usually have softer and less structured skills.
It goes without saying that there are and always will be functions that the Project Manager and Business Analyst roles are specifically equipped to best manage and handle. For example, the domain expertise of a business analyst and ability to document business requirements is going to be harder for a project manager to duplicate while the experience and skills set to formally manage scope, schedules, risks, stakeholders and costs is not as easy to acquire for business analysts.
What to do?
When a candidate faces a requirement for a PM/BA role that they cannot really make out from the job description, it is important to carefully consider the exact requirements of the role, especially during the interviews. Take your time and ask the question to the hiring manager. Let them know the skills-set you bring to the table and draw a mental picture of the split of the role between these two very distinct roles. If it is heavily weighted towards PM and that is what you are experienced with or would like to do, then go for it. Similarly, if you are business analyst and see the interviewer’s responses being close to what you do. What you do not want to do is to get into a role that does not suit ‘YOU’. Just like you do not pretend that you can be paint a house, when you barely have the expertise or patience to paint a wall. You may be able to do one wall right but somewhere your experience and skills are going to start to show. The dripping paint and that unclean edge do show after the second room. Same way, your manager will be able to see through your discomfort with the role and it is probably more damaging to your career, the profession and you if you walk out with bad references from a role that you should have never taken in the first place.
If you were hoping to find an answer in the PMBOK, then remember PMBOK is not going to tell you what you can or cannot do. That is an individual decision. PMBOK was never and will never be a career advise guide. And neither can you ever be both a Project Manager AND a Business Analyst at the same time.
In the modern industrial environment, engineering projects tend to be characterized by having increasingly tighter schedules and complexity.
This requires more organized coordination between all the disciplines who participate in a project and also between the client and the engineering company developing the study in order to be aligned on scope requirements and client expectations.
This paper addresses the Project Manager’s question: how to improve project coordination throughout all project phases. In order to answer this question this article provides guidelines for successful coordination by presenting and describing in detail project reviews for typical projects in the field of Oil&Gas. Special focus will be given to design reviews which involve client participation and which are organized to present and validate project design concept as these reviews are considered the foundation of an optimized and well-organized project design. Other types of review in a project exist and must be conducted such as procurement strategy, constructability and cost control review, audit, monthly meeting, etc… will not be discussed in this article.
After first describing different ways to organize and manage project reviews, the key reviews for an Oil&Gas project are shown. In the last part of this paper a business case based on a typical project in the field of Oil&Gas illustrates a project Review Plan for a basic engineering phase and the related project schedule.
By Raffaele Giovinazzi and Louis Ollivier
Successful-project-coordination
Figure 1 – General Process Overview
PROFILE RAFFAELE GIOVINAZZI
Raffaele Giovinazzi is a Project Manager of Jacobs France.
He has more than 10 years of experience in petrochemical and oil & gas field and he has been involved in all project phases from conceptual design to completion for different plants across the world (Europe, Middle East and Asia). He is also lecturer at ENSTA (Ecole Nationale Superieure de Techniques Avancées) Engineering University of Paris.
PROFILE LOUIS OLLIVIER
Louis OLLIVIER is the Head of the Coordination and Architecture Department of Jacobs France. He is also in charge of the integration of CAD 3D model and data base tools in the Engineering processes, for all Jacobs France lines of business.
He has more than 20 years of experience mainly as Engineering Manager and as Project Manager covering Petrochemicals, Gas Plants and Pharmaceutical facilities. He also spent more than 2 years as Jacobs France Quality Manager.
Effective and proficient teams are part of a well-organized workplace. Team work is one of the most important factors for the success of any company, business and organization. “Teamwork”, “the ability to work in a team”, these statements are being overused in personal CVs; they lost their meaning, turning into sort of a cliché.
Many individuals understand the theory, but fail in practice, when it comes to working in a team. There are a few principles any team-worker should know by heart and apply, in order to achieve the desired results. One has to view the team as an entity, be willing to learn from the other team members, be part of a healthy competition, in order to “survive” in the world of teamwork.
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Project managers are the bread and butter of any business. Their skillset extends far beyond that of what you might expect, or perhaps you know this and that is why your reading this article? A project manager needs to build a competent team to ensure the successful progression and eventual completion of a project.
Team members rely heavily on direction, leadership skills and advice. Members of the team will tend to respond in a more positive way when they value the skills of their guide – in this case, the project manager.
Some of the most important skills that can help a project manager develop into a leader and forge together a successful team are listed here.
Click to continue reading “Developing Leadership Skills as a Project Manager”