You're A Business Analyst? A Project Manager? Oh A Hybrid Then?

Previous articles in this series have addressed identifying risks to the project and choosing which risks to avoid or minimize by scoring and prioritizing the identified risks. Project managers lead, direct, delegate, manage, oversee, and encourage team members and stakeholders to commit the time and skills needed to get the project done. Project managers on the other hand, develop and plan the timeline and goals for their team in order to complete an assignment given to them by upper management.

However, on larger projects or in complex organisations, the Business Sponsor's financial responsibilities may be fulfilled by a higher authority such as an investment board or an executive committee. If you consider a business analyst their focus is more on the business and the broader context of the business's objectives and changes.

As the person who is most familiar with the product and taking financial responsibility, product managers need to make the most product related decisions, like from layout, colour theme, icons, to promotion, continuous evaluation, which is the killer function in the product etc.

Very little overlap exists between the two positions with regard to responsibilities, as business analysts are interpreters of data, while project managers implement the tasks they are assigned. It is vital that you have to be aware that business analysts may or might not work on jobs, determined by how they're used in an organization.

You're learning lots of different tools across the domains or the knowledge areas of the Business Analyst Body of Knowledge (BABOK), and you're learning how to apply the tools in a situational basis, sometimes in a project sometimes not. These folks focus efforts inside the company — at processes, practices, and internal systems — to determine how to best build and support what the product manager is requesting on behalf of customers and the educational market.