technical knowledge

Five ‘must-have’ skills to be a Business Analyst

As stated in my previous post, a Business Analyst is a quite powerful role that establishes the base of a project. It is the first visible pillar for a project which involves communication, leadership, writing, technical and functional skills together. A business analyst has to have a great depth of knowledge of the business on one hand, a sharp understanding power, strong writing skills, great communicator, and a good influencer. Let us see what are the ‘must-have’ skills without which a business analyst can not survive? And why are those skills so important to be a business analyst? Without any relevance to the order in which they are mentioned (as all are equally important) these skills are:

5. Business Knowledge: A good amount of experience/ exposure/ knowledge of customer business are very important for a business analyst

4. Listen and Understand: A business analyst has to be a good listener and with a sharp understanding power without which all the discussions with customer will be fruitless.

3. Technical Knowledge: There will be quite a few technical discussions at customer site. The BA has to be quite conversant with the technologies and methodologies present at his organization.

2. Communication: A business analyst has to be a strong communicator. During the customer meetings, if he does not communicate well about his organization’s capabilities to build up the trust and confidence, probably customer may not gel well with his ideas.

1. Writing skills: Very important skill required for documentation and for conveying the right messages across the board.

20 gems for project managers

1. A project manager is always right
2. Quality is seriously maintained by developers while developing software
3. A separate set of people (quality control or testers) is not required to take care of the software produced or developed
4. Testers don’t do any substantial value addition in product development
5. Testers lack business knowledge
6. Testers lack technical knowledge
7. Testers lack essential skills to test software
8. Testers don’t understand product requirements well
9. All developments and implementations are prone to extensions because of change in customer requirements or other customer constraints
10. All delays in development and implementation are due to customer
11. Testers have a very little role to play in product development
12. Testers need less than 1% of project time for testing and reporting bugs
13. Testers should be able to test the product well even if substantial knowledge related to product has not been shared with them
14. Testers are the biggest misleading agents
15. Developers and programmers are not testers and thus are not supposed to test what they develop
16. Testers are de-motivators to programmers and developers
17. Testers are project delayers
18. Customers blame development and implementation teams just to hide their own shortcomings
19. Customers don’t know to explain their processes and business rules well
20. Customers are always interested in delaying the project

Top 5 reasons of Project Manager getting fired

Project Failure: First failure will downgrade the level of next project to be given to the project manager. Not only this, but it will also trigger hidden cameras in the organization that start monitoring each and every step of project manager. These hidden cameras could be top management or some selected down the line people working with project manager.
Customer Feedback: Organizations are taking customer feedback very seriously. A remark by a customer regarding a project manager – “I want this project manager to manager all my future projects ordered to you. Infact if you don’t depute this person as project manager, you don’t accept our orders” triggered such a magic that it immediately presented the project manager with an out-of-turn hefty increment. On the other hand a customer CEO sent a confidential email message to the CEO of projects organization stating – “We don’t want the current project manager to be seen in out campus with immediate effect” put a very big question mark on project manager’s capabilities.
Project Team Feedback: Sometimes even if Project fails project manager is able to survive if project team and customer give a positive feedback. Then the reasons are different which are beyond the control of project manager. But if project fails and feedback is also not very positive, all axes will fall on project manager’s neck.
Lack of Technical Depth: A shallow or artificial demonstration of technical depth will not help for long. Although project manager has not to do technical activities on his own but his depth of knowledge will definitely help in driving the project in right direction and meeting targets.
Lack of business knowledge: Sometimes smart team members manage many a weaknesses of their project manager if he has demonstrated his strength in certain areas. But the lack of business knowledge is something that will certainly affect the product built, customer confidence in product and project manager’s knowledge. And if project manager is not clear about the business concepts of the customer, his presence in project, product and customer meetings will not be as effective as it is supposed to be.