fpatrick's posterous

Am I a Business Analyst? What about those calling themselves BAs?

Up until this time, I had actually never considered myself a BA because I had never actually given it any thought! As a self employed consultant, the only thing that matters is doing a good enough job to keep people wanting you to come back. So to that end, I didn’t worry so much about what I was called, provided that my clients were happy and the invoice was paid. But even if I wasn’t a consultant, I think that role titles often do not reflect reality and they also have a pigeonholing effect, depending on the attitudes and perceptions of what others think that role entails. Many position titles were discussed, “Solutions Architect”, “Business Architect”, “Change Manager” and some that were so pretentious that they bordered on wanky. More fancy words with no more clarity. No wonder many BA’s are struggling a bit for a sense of identity.
via cleverworkarounds.com

Interesting piece for my BA friends.

Calling Bullshit on Project Management 2.0

Calling Bullshit on Project Management 2.0 -- OK. I've got your attention with my over the top title. Sorry about that.

Actually, over at Glen Alleman's Herding Cats: Top Down / Bottom Up = Project Management 2.0? Not with this approach, he doesn't so much call bullshit on PM 2.0 but rather on an unconvincing setup and payoff of someone else's promotion of the idea that purports to blend the best parts of "traditional" (for want of a better word) and "agile" PM.

I can't stand it when the presentation of good ideas are ruined by poorly developed logic and arguments promoting them.

Magic Numbers - Project Management

Magic Numbers - Project Management -- From Scott Berkun, The magic numbers of project management, an exploration of some of the games played with estimates.

One of the things he doesn't mention in the "what to do instead" section is to make the estimation process a conversation and the open use of range estimates (buffers) for the project as a whole. This takes the pressure off of everybody to come up with [the impossible] accurate estimate.

Other professions have learned how to predict uncertain futures as reality. Not enough PMs try.

MS Project 2010 Unveiled

MS Project 2010 Unveiled -- ComputerWorld reports that MicroSoft has opened up on the next version of MS Project, the application we all love to hate. It's apparently picking up the "ribbon" interface that has me still re-learning how to do things in Office 2007.

Brian Kennemer at Projectified is highlighting some of the features, including a Team Planner and a Timeline view. I'm sure he'll be coming out with more.

My big questions are whether they're fixing the print function so it's more intuitive about what'll show up on a page without going through multiple iterations of Print Preview, and, more important, if the scheduling engine will let you level resources BEFORE identifying a critical path.