Author: Elizabeth Larson

Elizabeth Larson, has been the CEO for Watermark Learning as well as a consultant and advisor for Educate 360. She has over 35 years of experience in project management and business analysis. Elizabeth has co-authored five books and chapters published in four additional books, as well as articles that appear regularly in BA Times and Project Times. Elizabeth was a lead author/expert reviewer on all editions of the BABOK® Guide, as well as the several of the PMI standards. Elizabeth enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and spending time with her 6 grandsons and 1 granddaughter.

7 Trends in Business Analysis, Project Management, and Agile

Written by Elizabeth Larson on January 18, 2016. Posted in Articles.

Each year since 2009 we have enjoyed reflecting on what’s happened the previous year in the areas of business analysis and project management (including Agile), and making predictions for the upcoming year. To summarize the trends we saw in 2015:

Focus on entrepreneurship and innovation, including distributed leadership and the rise of intrapreneurs. This is still hot, hot, hot, but innovation for innovation’s sake is not.
Challenges with Agile adoption. For new challenges, read on.
What we called a schizophrenic approach to certifications. To learn about what’s happening with certifications, read on.
Use of designs during analysis. This was a new concept last year. To understand why it is still important, read on.
Struggle with how much requirements management governance is enough.

Here are the industry trends we see happening for the upcoming year.

1. Proving our value through Business Relationship Management

Executives have long been interested in getting the most value from programs and projects. They want initiatives that show true commitment to value realization. This need is one reason for the increased popularity of Agile. A new trend that is also helping ensure that value is achieved is the emergence of the business relationship manager (BRM) role. BRMs are more than just liaisons between business and IT. They propose and help influence the portfolios, programs, and projects that will deliver the most value. The role is accountable not only for delivering value but also for proving it.

We think this role will begin to gain popularity because too often the responsibility for measuring value has fallen into the chasm between business units and service providers, meaning no one focuses on it. BRMs fill that void, for example, by linking the actual benefits received from an initiative back to the forecasted benefits in a business case. This feedback loop greatly improves initial forecasts, project selection, and leads to quicker decisions to abandon projects that aren’t delivering sufficient value.

2. Agile is gaining wide acceptance but still faces challenges

As Agile practices gain traction in some organizations and mature in others, some significant questions still remain including:

Is everyone on board? For example, some executives want Agile without understanding the organizational commitment and cultural changes required. Some executives are on board, as are the Agile teams, but mid-management resists. Sometimes Agile is successfully adopted by the IT organization, but not by other stakeholders. With this mismatch in acceptance comes a mismatch in expectations that will need to be addressed.
Can teams be truly cross-functional? Organizations often struggle with how to incorporate roles that do not clearly fit into one of the Scrum roles of scrum master, product owner, or development team member. Some have found it hard for all team members to effectively do more traditional “specialized” roles like UI/UX, database analyst, business analyst, tester, etc.
How much governance should the team follow? Teams are still struggling with such things as how to measure velocity and the associated need for metrics, how much planning is needed, and the age-old how much documentation is enough.
Can partial adoption work? We hear client stories about not having time for retrospectives, daily standups, and other ceremonies. Referred to by names such as Scrumerfall and Waterscrum, these methods have both supporters and detractors.

We believe that although these issues will not be solved in the upcoming year, they will be addressed.

3. Moving beyond our traditional PM and BA roles

Traditionally, Business Analysts have “gathered and managed” requirements and Project Managers have managed a project’s time, budget, and scope. The future is looking very different. The same responsibilities will be needed, but they will be augmented with strategic-oriented duties. Organizations increasingly realize they need to ensure projects actually deliver the benefit value that was stated in the business case. Smart organizations are deploying project professionals more strategically to help them obtain and prove the increased value, including new roles that go beyond the traditional BA and PM (see trend #1).

Project Managers are increasingly focused on delivering the benefits and value outlined in the business case and program charter. Plus, there is a growing trend of aligning projects to the strategic initiatives of the organization.
Business Analysts who can question the strategic implications of projects and facilitate understanding the real business need behind stated needs are providing increased value to the organization and its customers.

This trend is good news for project managers and business analysts who like to think and contribute strategically.

4. Lightweight practices are not just for Scrum anymore

Project Managers and others really are finally making peace with the idea that delivering value is what matters, not whether or not they’re Agile and how Agile are they. Yes, people still struggle with organizational change issues around implementing Agile, and yes, team members aren’t always given what they need to make the switch effectively. But the angst increasingly is no longer about whether organizations or teams can call ourselves Agile; it’s (appropriately) about whether what they’re doing benefits the organization, particularly when they’re doing more than is really needed. If doing the right amount of work for the organization manifests itself in some kind of light-weight, Agile-traditional combo practices, then organizations are becoming more OK with that, as long as it delivers value fast and eliminates waste. This is happening outside the boundaries of projects, as well. Whether it’s HR decreasing the frequency of, or even eliminating, regular performance reviews, or organizational metrics around customer or employee satisfaction getting culled back to scales of 1-3 or simply yes/no, it’s not that less is more. Less is the norm.

5. Certifications – and the winners are. . . .

As predicted a year ago, there is still no clarity related to industry certifications. There are some changes, though.

Some certifications, once popular in limited geographic locations, are growing significantly. For example, the number of PRINCE2 exams taken in the US grew by 35% in 2015. IREB (International Requirements Management Board) is also gaining momentum.
Despite the predicted demise of associations like PMI and IIBA, both are still here, both are emphasizing business analysis, and both are trying to broaden their reach. IIBA is offering four levels of certifications and PMI not only has a business analysis certification but is currently working on a full business analysis standard.

As a side note and cautionary tale, the Harvard Business Review recently posted an article about the need for all professional associations, not just those related to project management and business analysis, to rebrand, as members find alternate ways to network and learn.

6. Designs during analysis bring business value quicker

As we predicted last year, the increasing use of business analysis techniques for “non-technical” design work is gaining momentum. This approach is similar to design thinking and moves the focus from product requirements to product features and functions. This trend is popular because it leverages tried and true methods for understanding customer needs and gets them into a buildable solution quicker.

Here are some examples of “non-technical” designs. Instead of listing data requirements in a simple data dictionary, the trend is to create a fully normalized data model. Instead of creating a use case narrative that must be transformed into other objects, the trend is to create them in the form of readily useful acceptance criteria. Instead of ignoring user interfaces, the trend is to create prototypes that reflect business needs. Each of these helps create the solution sooner, thereby helping the organization achieve maximum value sooner.

7. Workforce Trends are Impacting Project Work and Organizations.

There are a number of trends related to how organizations get work done.

There is an increasing comfort level using Skype, IM, and other tools for impromptu, short communications outside the context of actual meetings. Because communication is increasingly becoming less formal and more frequent, we are starting to reclaim some of the connectedness we recently lost working virtually. Engaging stakeholders virtually is also becoming more doable with the online tools.
To address the preferences of many younger workers, learning events are becoming shorter and more personalized by incorporating the array of digital learning tools now available. Personalized learning environments are providing workers with an opportunity to think in new ways and continually learn as they adjust and adapt to new technology and evolving processes.
Organizations are beginning to adjust to the fact that many workers are not interested in staying in one job for any length of time. This includes not only younger workers but older workers who are looking to expand their skills in the second-half of their work lives. This will increasingly present a challenge to organizations and projects at risk of losing both younger and older workers with valuable knowledge and experience.

[i] Harvard Rusiness Review, To Stay Relevant, Professional Associations Must Rebrand by Denise Lee Yohn https://hbr.org/2016/01/to-stay-relevant-professional-associations-must-rebrand, January 5. 2-16. viewed on January 13, 2016.

About the Authors

Andrea Brockmeier, PMP, CSM, PMI-ACP, is the Director of Project Management at Watermark Learning. She has 20+ years of experience in project management and related practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, business analysis, and influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she is a member of the certification team. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the cultural aspects of team development, as well as the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.

Elizabeth Larson, PMP, CBAP, CSM, PMI-PBA is Co-Principal and CEO of Watermark Learning and has over 30 years of experience in project management and business analysis. Elizabeth’s speaking history includes repeat presentations for national and international conferences on five continents.

Elizabeth has co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation. She has also co-authored chapters published in four separate books. Elizabeth was a lead author on several standards including the PMBOK® Guide, BABOK® Guide, and PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners – A Practice Guide.

Richard Larson, PMP, CBAP, PMI-PBA, President and Founder of Watermark Learning, is a successful entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in business analysis, project management, training, and consulting. He has presented workshops and seminars on business analysis and project management topics to over 10,000 participants on five different continents.

Rich loves to combine industry best practices with a practical approach and has contributed to those practices through numerous speaking sessions around the world. He has also worked on the BA Body of Knowledge versions 1.6-3.0, the PMI BA Practice Guide, and the PM Body of Knowledge, 4th edition. He and his wife Elizabeth Larson have co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation.

Susan Heidorn, PMP, CBAP, Ed.D, CSM, is the Director of Business Solutions at Watermark Learning. Susan Heidorn is an experienced consultant, facilitator, speaker, and trainer, with over twenty years of business experience. She provides project and program management, strategic thinking & planning, leadership development, business analysis, facilitation, process improvement, change management, and team development to her clients based on best practices in the industry.

BABOK Version 3 vs. Version 2 – Taming the new Guide – Part 3: BA CORE CONCEPT MODEL (BACCM) and Perspectives

Written by Elizabeth Larson on July 6, 2015. Posted in Articles.

In our continuing series on BABOK version 3 vs. version 2, we conclude with the two major additions made by IIBA: the BA Core Concept Model™ (BACCM) and an all-new section containing five perspectives on Business Analysis. This article provides a summary of the new BACCM, a practical definition of the six core concepts, and an example of each. This article also describes the new Perspectives and provides examples of the common elements in all the Perspectives.

BA CORE CONCEPT MODEL (BACCM)

One of the key changes in the BABOK® Guide version 3.0 is the introduction of the Business Analysis Core Concept Model (BACCM). This model defines the framework for all business analysis work, and can be applied across industries, methodologies, projects, and organizational cultures. It shows the interrelationships among six core concepts: Needs, Solutions, Changes, Stakeholders, Value, and Contexts. There is no order to these six concepts that can be read in a variety of different patterns. Let’s look at each of these six concepts and then some of the ways each relates to the others.

Figure 1 below, published by IIBA in the BABOK® Guide version 3.0, shows the BACCM.

Needs refer to business problems that require solving or opportunities that can be seized. Needs are satisfied by Solutions.

Solutions are the products and services that provide ways to take advantage of opportunities and solve business problems. Solutions are developed through Changes consisting of one or several projects, programs, or initiatives. Examples include installation of commercial software and changes to the current processes, development of a new medical device, creation of a marketing campaign, or implementation of new regulations.

Figure 1: Business Analysis Core Concept Model

Changes are the steps involved in transforming Needs into Solutions. Note that the word “Change” is used in the BABOK® Guide in lieu of the terms “Project” and “Program.”

Stakeholders are individuals or groups that have Needs, an interest in the Solution, and/or are affected by the Changes.

Value. Solutions need to provide Value to the organizations and Stakeholders. If Solutions do not provide Value, they have not met the Need. Business analysis is really all about delivering Value to the organization.

Contexts are all those things that affect and are relevant to the Changes. This is the environment in which the Solution will be developed and includes such things as organizational culture, as well as the culture of the various countries that might be involved, languages, organizational process assets and environmental factors, constraints like weather, seasons, or other things happening at an organization or within a division or department.

Let’s look at an example of these interrelationships.

Need. A sponsor is concerned about losing market share to a competitor. One of the problems that contributes to this loss is the limited information provided by the set of Order reports she currently receives. Her Need, then, is the limited Order information inhibiting her ability to make good buying decisions.

Solution. After some analysis and a business case, the business analyst has recommended commercial business analytics software as a Solution. This is a complex Solution that will involve multiple projects addressing such things as processes, software, and new technology to name a few.

Changes. The Changes to the organization will be significant. The analysis of the current state and definition of the future state done during Strategy Analysis will need to be refined and expanded. Some of the Changes include designing new processes, purchasing new software, modifying data structures in existing interfacing applications, capturing new data, building technical ways to transition to the new software, and more.

Stakeholders. Stakeholders including buyers, merchandisers, advertising staff, distribution centers, retail store personnel, customer service specialists, several vendors, and many areas in IT will be affected globally.

Value. This Solution will provide Value to the sponsor, many Stakeholders, and the organization. The business case included a cost/benefit analysis which showed that although the costs were high, the organization would start seeing a benefit within a year. Several solution performance measures were identified during Solution Evaluation to help measure the realized value.

Contexts. Since this is a complex project with globally distributed Stakeholders, there are many Contexts that need to be considered. Each country’s laws and regulations, the various national cultures, as well as the different departmental cultures will affect the development of the Solution. For example and speaking generally, the distribution staff tends to be casual, the buyers more goal-driven and direct, and the advertisers more expressive. In addition, one of the facilities is in central Europe, which has recently experienced massive flooding. Finally, monsoon season is approaching India, where some of the technical and support staff are located.

Understandably not all Solutions and Changes are as complex as this one. This example was meant to provide an understanding of each of these six core concepts and how they fit together.

Perspectives

The BABOK® Guide Perspectives are focused areas that need to be addressed depending on the nature of the project. Each Perspective provides how business analysis work is completed and its unique characteristics on projects with these Perspectives:

Agile
Business Intelligence
Information Technology
Business Architecture
Business Process Management (BPM)

Some projects will have multiple perspectives. A business analytics application, for example, might have elements from all five perspectives.

Each perspective is organized into five sections:

Change scope (think project scope) includes such things as which areas of the organization are impacted and will be affected by the approach taken. For example, the Agile perspective alludes to a constantly changing scope. The BPM perspective contains four typical lifecycle stages and several methods to outline the scope.
Business analysis scope includes the scope of the business analysis work, including which artifacts or work products will be produced and which stakeholders will be involved in the change. For example, the Agile perspective notes that the amount of rigor applied to documentation, a business analysis work product, is dependent on the nature of the project.
Methodologies, approaches, and techniques. Each Perspectives might have some specific methodologies or approaches that are unique to that Perspective. Scrum, for example, is an Agile Methodology. Information Technology has its own development life cycles. As an example of a technique, Prioritization is listed as a general technique, but in the Agile perspective MoSCoW prioritization is listed as an Agile-specific type of prioritization.
Underlying competencies include those that are most relevant to each perspective. They do not have to be unique and might be relevant to other Perspectives as well. For example, the Communications and Collaboration technique is listed as an underlying competency in the Agile perspective. Collaboration Games is listed as a general technique. Communications Skills is listed as a general underlying competency.
Impact on Knowledge Areas shows a mapping of specific activities relevant to the Perspective to the BABOK® Guide tasks. For example, the Agile Perspective discusses the relationship to the Requirements Life Cycle Knowledge Area, stating that requirements are defined with increasing detail and that validation of requirements is done at the end of each iteration. The BI Perspective mentions overcoming barriers to utilizing new analytic tools and techniques in Solution Evaluation.

This article has provided a summary of the new BACCM and Perspectives with some examples to help decipher these new concepts. The overall series of articles gives an in-depth look at the new BABOK version 3. The new Guide represents a major increase in content and improvement over version 2. Our goal was to explain the major changes and additions, and to structure and simplify it. Please respond with your comments, questions, and any disagreements.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

About the Authors

What the 2015 Trends Mean For Business Analysis and Project Management

Written by Elizabeth Larson on February 16, 2015. Posted in Articles.

In January we wrote an article like we do every year about the upcoming trends in business analysis and project management. In this article we want to discuss what these trends mean for practitioners of business analysis. Below are the seven trends we discussed in last month’s article and a short description of each.

Table 1 Seven Trends

Original 7 Trends	Short Description
Distributed leadership	Leadership will become more distributed and will be increasingly as much about tapping into the leadership of those around us as it is about a single visionary, decision-maker, and communicator.
Design	Organizations who start providing “logical” or “conceptual” design outputs as part of building apps and business processes will shrink the gap between business needs and functioning products and create better products faster.
Schizophrenic approach to certification	Both the trend to become certified and the trend to reject certifications will play out in 2015. With the increased popularity in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), counterbalanced with the rise in the number of PMs interested in business analysis means that many practitioners will want certifications, while others will question their value.
Innovation and entrepreneurship	To go beyond mere process improvement, organizations will need to become more entrepreneurial. Innovation centers and hubs are on the increase, and companies are investing in their own incubators away from their main operations to help spur the creative process.
Changing culture through Agile team training	Agile training will be geared toward entire teams rather than individuals. Agile is going to drive organizations to seek more effective ways to generate a change in project practice. NOTE: we’ve expanded this trend to address the need to change organizational culture quickly. This is the focus of today’s article.
Balance in project governance	Organizations will continue to struggle to find balance between the extremes of project chaos and centralized project governance. Ultimately some projects will require more governance and some less.
Making Agile work for organizations	We predict that organizations will find a way to make Agile work for them by becoming more purposeful in how they choose to adopt it.

Helping organizations change – quickly. We believe that organizations are crying for new ways of doing things and that simply saying that they want to offer new products or services means ramifications greater than running a press release or having the CEO or agency head announce the decision. Many operational areas will often be impacted. People will have to learn new business processes, use new software, often buy new hardware, and sometimes report to new managers. They will have to learn how to sell, reorder, merchandise, and/or support the product or service. Often most challenging, though, is its acceptance, which requires changing the organizational culture.

Project managers will need to understand that the project’s focus has to be more than on implementing the new solution. Business analysis practitioners will need to help the organizations prepare for the change. They will need to work with affected operational areas to help them understand what the change means for them, the difference between their current world and how it will be different going forward. BAs and PMs have talked for decades about how slow it is to change organizational culture. We have used the analogy of trying to move a big cruise ship around in the ocean. Yet organizations need to find a way to change the culture more quickly.

Those who survive and thrive will have to be culture changers or contribute not just to helping organizations change, but helping them change more quickly. To help us understand this important concept, we have taken our 2015 trends and categorized them areas needed to enable change quickly. Those four categories are:

Distributed power. The first has to do with Power, the ability to impose our will—to get people to do what we want them to do. There are many ways people use power. We might threaten a punishment, offer a reward, or overwhelm them with what we know. We can use our authority, that positional power that comes from our place in the organization. (Well, some people can, typically not BAs or PMs). We can use all those forms of power, but none of them is affective as using our leadership skills, the power that we have within us to communicate our vision, to offer direction, and to have others follow us.

Distributed power means that organizations will have to accept that relying on positional power, in other words authority, will slow them down. The idea of power and decision-making in the hands of executives, directors, managers, or supervisors, or any one individual will cause delays. Going forward we expect that different people will take leadership roles at different times. Any individual might step up in a given situation, but not all situations. We’re saying that not only does leadership need to be distributed and more local, but power does as well. This might include, for example, the ability to reward people. Getting things done quickly will rely on decentralized project governance and self-organizing teams.
To use an Agile example, the scrum master might sometimes act as a leader. But if they do, it’s not based on their role, but on their ability to communicate with the team and the organization to remove impediments and resolve problems.

Practical solutions. Being innovative does not mean throwing out everything an organization does and starting over. Innovative solutions need to work. Organizations need to be able to implement them into their organizational cultures. Generally speaking, organizations are moving away from centralized project practices, one size fits all approaches in favor of choosing approaches best suited to each project. Top-down hierarchical communication is disappearing. Why? Because it takes too long to get anything done that way. Meetings need to be run more flexibly. Going fast are the old days of tight agendas where the meeting “leader” (usually us) controlled everything. Today’s meetings tend to be more informal, with neutral facilitators rather than meeting leaders, with participants scribing as needed, and where decisions are made more quickly.

Business analysis work is needed regardless of the project type. A rose by any other name is still a rose and business analysis is business analysis even if we call it systems analysis, business systems analysis, conceptual design, etc. We’re still doing business analysis when we manage requirements, do business systems analysis, design, logical or conceptual design, when we go about getting the detail needed, and whether or not it is done by BA, PM, designer/developer, part of the development team or someone else. And this work will not go away, regardless of the trend in development methodologies

Influencing without authority. Those who can’t influence will not add value and if they don’t add value, they will not succeed. Being innovative will require being able to influence those who don’t work for us. We will need to be collaborative and work through others to help organizations succeed.

The table below lists the seven trends and shows their relationship to the four categories. Each trend falls into multiple categories and each category contains multiple trends.

7 Trends	Distributed Power	Focus on the Practical	More Business Analysis Work, Less BA Role	Influencing Without Authority
Distributed leadership	X	X	X	X
Design		X	X
Schizophrenic approach to certification				X
Innovation and entrepreneurship	X	X	X	X
Culture changers needed	X	X	X	X
Balance in project governance	X			X
Anything agile	X	X	X	X

Summary. The key to being successful in business analysis and project management is to understand that business analysis is not going away, but how we do it is changing. To be successful we will have to offer quick, practical solutions. If our current job is to elicit and document requirements, it will decrease in value. If we’re project coordinators or schedulers, our jobs will also decrease in value. We need to get out of the business analysis and project management assembly lines. We need to spot opportunities and use our influencing skills to encourage organizational change needed to take advantage of those opportunities

So here’s the bottom line –we will have tons of freedom to be creative to do the right thing for the organization. It’s going to be easier for those of us who want to make a difference in our organizations and in the larger professional community to be able to do so. And this is very, very good news indeed!!

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

About the Authors

2015 Trends in Business Analysis and Project Management

Written by Elizabeth Larson on January 12, 2015. Posted in Articles.

Each year we like to reflect on what’s happened in the business analysis, project management, and Agile professions and make our predictions for the upcoming year.

To summarize the trends we saw in 2014:

Continued excitement about Agile projects with more informal communications and documentation and use of modeling tools to get from high-level user stories to detail needed to estimate and build them
Focus on Design
Cloud computing
Greater interest in business analysis by project managers.

Below are the seven new trends we see in the Project Management and Business Analysis fields for 2015.

Making Agile work for organizations. As the Agile bandwagon continues to grow, some organizations, previously reluctant to jump aboard, are running to catch up. Sometimes, though, Agile is implemented without much thought to unintended consequences of not having enough organizational commitment when adopting Agile. Although such things as not having dedicated teams, a dedicated business product owner, or extending time boxes to fit more work into an iteration sometimes works, there are often related issues, such as:
1. 1. Team burnout
  2. Less work being implemented
  3. Unmet customer expectations
We predict that organizations will find a way to make Agile work for them by becoming more purposeful in how they choose to adopt it. As a related trend, we think that some of the Agile purists will become more flexible, softening the “my way or the highway” approach in favor of one that is more collaborative. It means that organizations will have to articulate the business problem they are trying to solve by adopting Agile. In addition, those coaches who are accustomed to dictating what must be done will need to seek more organizational input.
Distributed leadership. Leadership will become more distributed and will be increasingly as much about tapping into the leadership of those around us as it is about a single visionary, decision-maker, and communicator. This idea isn’t new, but as organizations and project teams struggle with the adoption of Agile, coming to terms with what it means to be a self-organizing team will highlight the value of everyone stepping up to the role of leader.
In addition, the idea of leading for the purpose of developing relationships is going to be the focus of team building. Leadership is more than getting people to perform for the benefit of the bottom line. It’s about the people and connecting with them. Leaders are selected, recognized, and evaluated for their ability to sincerely tap into the human experiences their people represent. The intrinsic value of understanding others in order to establish meaningful relationships among team members, particularly those who are often physically distant, will be emphasized.
Innovation and entrepreneurship on the rise, and morphing. One can’t help but see books, articles, and blog posts about innovation these days. Not only our own industry outlets, but other media seem to have discovered the innovation “bug.” Many organizations will innovate through process improvement, and in some cases there is not much difference.
To go beyond mere process improvement, organizations will need to become more entrepreneurial. Innovation centers and hubs are on the increase, and companies are investing in their own incubators away from their main operations to help spur the creative process. Smaller, more isolated teams of “intrapreneurs” will provide the kind of “disruptive” break-throughs needed for true innovation and market leadership to take place. Savvy business analysts and project managers will step up to take on these entrepreneurial roles in organizations.
Business analysis as design work. As we mentioned in last year’s trends, the upcoming release of the BABOK Guide version 3.0 will awaken the “inner designer” in people doing business analysis work. There has long existed a gap between requirements and physical design. Organizations who start providing “logical design” outputs as part of building apps and business processes will shrink that gap and create better products faster. They will realize less rework by using standard models such as business process maps, use case models, prototypes and wireframes, state-transition, and sequence diagrams to name a few.
We have been promoting “logical modeling” for years and have been surprised that many organizations have not supported the design capabilities of business analysis. We see hope in the new BABOK and predict that organizations will at least consider changing their development processes to encompass more logical design. Smart companies will actually embrace the new design paradigm.
Struggle between centralized and distributed project governance. Organizations will continue to struggle to find balance between the extremes of project chaos and centralized project governance. We predict that in the near future organizations will continue to adopt an “all or none” approach to project governance. We see the era of centralized project governance, such as PMOs and Centers of Excellence, giving way to a more distributed governance, with some organizations letting individual project teams decide how much governance to employ. However, we know that when organizations move to one extreme to solve their problems, others are created. We predict that in the future organizations will take a more balanced approach and apply more governance for certain types of projects and less for others.
Schizophrenic approach to BA and PM credentials. We predict that both the trend to become certified and the trend to reject certifications will play out in 2015. With the increased popularity in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), some from prestigious universities like Harvard and University of Michigan, learning about new topics and acquiring new skills at a low or no cost will appeal to many BAs, PMs and their organizations. To the extent that these new learning channels provide “just-in-time training,” they will reinforce the notion among some BAs and PMs that certifications and professional designations like PMP and CBAP are not an indication of competency and therefore not worth having.
At the same time, however, many PMs, BAs, and their organizations around the globe recognize that these credentials show knowledge gained and are an example of the initiative and hard work needed to get certified. We have seen large numbers of BAs eagerly awaiting the release of IIBA’s BABOK v.3, and many others are racing to be certified under the current release before the exam changes. In the PM space, we have seen a rise in the number of PMs interested in business analysis. PMI’s PBA as well as their ACP certifications are generating lots of interest that we think will continue to grow. Finally, there seems to be no slowing of interest in Agile certifications such as the CSM.
Team-based Agile training. Agile training will be geared toward entire teams rather than individuals. Agile is going to drive organizations to seek more effective ways to generate a change in project practice. The notion of sending an individual to training to become the internal evangelist is too much for a single person to do when it comes to the far-reaching culture changes required to implement A. Plugging into existing processes, tools, and infrastructure after traditional PM training is entirely different than expecting someone to come back from training and single-handedly explain and implement the why, what, and how of Agile. Expect more interest in generating internal momentum for change by sending teams to training who learn the why and how of self-organization. Training for entire intact teams is how organizations will get out of the gate and it’s more likely to be augmented by coaching and a follow-up with on-site presence to help as organizations figure out how to make Agile work for them.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

About the Authors:

Andrea Brockmeier, PMP, CSM, PMI-ACP, is the Client Solutions Director for Project Management at Watermark Learning. She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, including PMP® certification, as well as influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she was a member of the certification team for over eight years. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.

About the Authors

Five Rules for Project Success – Based on the Children’s World Cup Soccer Rules

Written by Elizabeth Larson on July 7, 2014. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Five Rules for Project Success – Based on the Children’s World Cup Soccer Rules

This article was originally published in 2010 after playing soccer with my grandsons shortly after the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. On a recent trip to Croatia we had the opportunity to watch several FIFA 2014 World Cup matches, which reminded me that the analogy of soccer and our projects still works. Here is the article.

I am not a big sports fan. My husband is an avid fan of baseball and American football, but I usually go about my business despite the frequent exclamations of euphoria and despair that reverberate throughout the house during sporting events. But a recent visit with our grandsons raised my interest in one sport—soccer (football). Having recently played World Cup soccer with four grandsons aged 8-2, where the rules were emphatically if inconsistently enforced, I thought about how these children’s rules apply to projects. Given my lack of knowledge about the real World Cup rules, I don’t have the slightest inkling of whether these kids’ rules even come close to reality, but they seem to work. So, at the risk of overusing the myriad analogies relating children’s play to projects, here are five Kids’ World Cup Rules for successful projects.

Rule #1

Define the goal and how to reach it. In our kids’ game the goal kept changing. That is, how a goal was achieved was fluid. If the ball was kicked inbounds but bounced off the pole it probably didn’t count as a goal. Sometimes, though, it did. In the real World Cup and on our projects we need to have a clear goal. This means not only do we need to have clear, unchanging business and project objectives, but we need a clear plan for how to get there. If either the goal or the set of project management and business analysis processes vary too much, the players will be confused, frustrated, and ultimately unsuccessful.

Rule #2

Focusing too much on the goal at the expense of your opponent can get you a yellow card, which is like a strike in baseball. Three of them and you’re out, according to the Kids’ Rules. The grandsons loved marching around the field silently carrying a small yellow block when an infraction had occurred. In soccer we need to get the ball from our opponent in order to make a goal, but not by infringing on others. Many project managers focus on meeting the project objectives without paying enough attention to our “opponents,” those who are not supportive of the project. Perhaps the project goals and objectives are at odds with their own, perhaps they are uncomfortable with our project processes or they don’t like the sponsor or other stakeholders, perhaps the end result of the project means that they that they will have to learn new processes, no longer be experts, have to learn how to use new systems or products, or perhaps even lose their jobs. There are lots of reasons why some stakeholders may not want to support the project. However, it is vital to recognize the stakeholders who are our opponents and develop strategies to bring them on board.

Rule #3

The red card-means you’ve really messed up and you’re expelled from the game. Fortunately our grandsons were not cutthroat and red cards were not abundant. On projects expulsion can happen when trust has been broken. Sometimes we don’t even know that we’ve been expelled. But if we feel like a pariah, or if a lot of communication is going on behind our backs, or if our team seems less motivated, if subject matter experts (SMEs) start showing up late or missing meetings, we may have gotten that red card and been silently expelled.

Rule #4

When we mess up unintentionally we might get a green card. Apparently there is no such thing as a green card in the real world, that is, the real World Cup. Following the children’s’ rules, though, it means that a minor offense has been committed, but the play can proceed. In Kids’ Rules it means an unintentional offense. As grandparents and as project professionals we’re going to mess up, but if it’s unintentional, we will probably be forgiven. As a grandparent I usually got a green card for using my hands by mistake. However, when I used my hands several times in a row even though I didn’t mean to, patience wore thin, I was told “that’s not how you play the game,” and I was given a green card. On projects there will be times when we mess up, but as long as it’s unintentional and infrequent people will understand. But when we mess up the same way with the same stakeholders over and over, we are viewed as incompetent — a definite trust buster.

Rule #5

Don’t argue with the referee. You could end up with a red card. The referee is the referee. My grandsons were proud of Team USA who despite the bad call acted professionally and were good sports. On our projects the sponsor is the referee. We will probably disagree with our sponsor from time to time, but as we know the sponsor (referee) isn’t always right, but the sponsor is always the sponsor.

There are several other rules that apply, like what happens when we don’t have a referee (neutral facilitator) or when we don’t devote our entire attention to the game, but we’ll end here, wishing you fun with family and success with your projects.

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