A partnership between Project Manager and Business Analyst is one of the most powerful tools in project development. It helps to avoid failure and create a product that your target audience really needs.
Strong collaboration between Business Analyst and Project Manager is often difficult to achieve. Usually, it happens because of each other’s role misunderstanding, poor communication and lack of respect and trust.
PM collaboration is vital for project success. Effective communication, shared goals, and a collaborative mindset foster transparency, mitigate risks, and drive efficient decision-making, leading to timely delivery and satisfied stakeholders.
What approaches can help you to improve communication between BA and PM?
Exposit Project Managers and Business Analysts practice different approaches that help them understand each other better and achieve solid collaboration within projects:
- Equality
The peer-to-peer approach helps to avoid conflicts based on position range and role importance. Such relations are focused on collaboration and understanding that both of you are interested in the same thing – successful delivery. Equality retains BA and PM focus areas but leaves the possibility to help each other without shifting responsibilities. - Role, not title
Originally, BA and PM roles were combined into a dual responsibility of one specialist. That is why the duties of PM and BA are often misunderstood by themselves and their stakeholders. A clear understanding of responsibilities and contribution of each helps BA and PM build a strong partnership. Solid partnership excludes competition and breeds support driving project success. - Continuous open communication
Open communication helps to build trusting relations and have common ground. Whatever issue appears during the project you should be able to discuss it and find the best solution together. Open discussions also improve communication with stakeholders and reporting to the business domain. - Trust
Having trust between two roles helps to get rid of fears that BA and PM have towards each other. For example, PM may worry about how qualified the project’s estimate from the technical side will be. BAs, for their part, may doubt PM’s skills in implementing everything in time. When you have trust, you know that every member of your team has a common goal and do their best.
Where will the strong collaboration between BA and PM be especially useful?
- Requirements management
More than half of projects’ failures happen due to poor work with requirements. PM and BA collaboration can prevent it through a number of activities including validating and changing requirements within the project, prototyping, developing a project management plan and others. After the scope of work is fully determined, PM and BA maintain contact to solve issues appearing during development process. - User Acceptance Testing
In terms of Business Analysis and Project Management, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) activities can take place in every stage of a software development lifecycle including requirements, design, testing and maintenance stages. It helps to reduce risks in the early stages and save time and cost spent on development. UAT by PM and BA can include developing test plans, validating activities, reviewing test results and others. - Performance Analysis
When the project is already delivered to market BA and PM can collaborate on performance analysis considering whether the project meets their expectations and what else can be done to improve the result. BA and PM collaboration is also important in terms of prioritizing future enhancements.
Project manager and business analyst relationship
The relationship between a project manager and a business analyst is crucial. Their collaboration ensures clear requirements understanding, effective scope management, and alignment of project goals, ultimately leading to successful project outcomes and client satisfaction.
Business Analysts and Project Managers in Exposit team work closely together building their relations on absolute trust. We are always ready to improve your project software development process using the best practices of PM and BA collaboration.
