Preparing for the Battlefield

For about two months now, the O&B Project Management team has been consistently meeting to re-evaluate and improve the PM practices and tools in a systems development project. Our hard work has been paying off since we can evidently see our progress through the project management topics that we’ve discussed and finalized such as setting a standard processes for the project proposal and preparation stage, a checklist for project preparation, a standard communication plan, change request process and a risk assessment plan, covering the different risks that usually occur during a systems development project along with an action plan on how to handle the risk.

As new projects are coming in, our goal is to equip and train the PM/BAs with the necessary requirements needed for systems development projects. To reduce the risks and the learning curve involved in one of the new projects, the PM team (less Clair) decided to attend a free seminar on stocks to learn the terms and rules involved in the new business domain our project will cover. I was really excited to attend this seminar since I personally wanted to learn more about stocks and I didn’t have any idea on how the stock market runs. Personally, I think that the seminar we attended was really informative since it gave us a picture of how stocks are bought and sold, how the stock market runs and what some investment terms mean, some of which we’ve never even heard before. Come to think of it, this activity will not only help us PM/BAs do our work but also give us knowledge on the different business domains that we’ll have to study and handle for projects such as payroll and stocks. It’s certainly one advantage that we BA’s have since we personally get to know more about other business domains as well.

I think we PM/BAs should have more of these seminars on business domains (especially before a sure project) since it will assist us in doing business analysis especially if the PM/BA’s don’t have any idea on the business domain. In this way, we PM/BA’s can reduce asking questions like what a certain term means and get straight to the point and focus on actual requirements gathering and analysis. Through this activity, we can be more prepared to handle the business rules and requirements of the project and as well as reduce the learning curve upon execution of the project.

The remaining and most challenging part, I guess, is just for us to actually use everything we learned from the seminar and pm trainings, and see how far we’ve gone in preparing ourselves for the systems development project to come.