PM vs. BA

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the differences in the approach to the roles of the Project Manager and the Contract Officer Representative (PM vs. COR). But that doesn't identify all of the potential seams around the PM role. Today I want to take a look at the Project Manager versus the Business Analyst.


I came across this graphic in one of the training programs I participated in not too long ago. I am interested in becoming a CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional).



I don't see myself as fitting exclusively into the PM role or the BA role, and the reason for this is because if you can perform the PM role perfectly and still have a failed project. Similarly, you could perform the BA role perfectly and also fail with the project.

To be fair, I think that the PMI would disagree with this graphic on some points. I think PMs must deal with stakeholders and the graphic doesn't give them credit for that. I also think both PMs and BAs identify and deal with business issues as well.

But regardless, industry is intent on driving a wedge between these two roles. I suspect that the reason for that is because there is more money to be made in training and certifications if these are considered different roles. But I really think PMs need to be strong BAs in order to be really successful. You can't just control the levers of scope, schedule, risk, cost, quality and satisfaction and expect to be successful. You need (at least for IT project management) to understand the underlying business process that is to be automated. You must see the big picture and you must be able to zoom into portions of it to see greater detail. You can't just implement a quality control system and then sit back and forget it. You must be a part of the automation process to know that stakeholders are in fact testing and verifying the deliverables.

Anyway, for what it's worth, to people who are serious about project success and mission success, these are not different roles. I might have someone on the project whose responsibility is primarily geared towards business analysis, that isn't a problem, but I am also a BA on the project.

First Droid Snafu and Cool

I still love my Droid. For Christmas I received a car dock. And I was amazed to discover that the phone knew when it was in the car dock. This happened despite the lack of any discernable electronics in the dock itself. But as soon as I drop it in there it brings up the car navigation screen and puts a different icon in the status bar signifying that it is in a car dock.

The issue that I discovered is that the phone is not automatically in speakerphone mode while it is in the dock. That's weird right? How could I have it near my ear while it is in the dock? So if I could make a request of the Verizon gods, please make a change so that when car dock mode is on, speaker is on by default.

That covers the snafu part. The good part was that the voice recognition is awesome. I hit a button to call contacts and then I said my Dad's name and blamo, there is my Dad on the phone. I had to hit the button to put him on speaker, but still...

With the car dock, the navigation is really convenient. Now, I have it running all the time with the GPS enabled and turned on the traffic layer in Google maps and I actually avoided some bad traffic on my way home last night.

Finally, I linked to Tech Broiler with the promise of more stupid droid trick volumes. He has another week but he will be dumped soon if he doesn't get more 'stupid'.

Federal Employees Almanac

I came in to work this morning and found a book on my chair. It is the 2009 Federal Employees Almanac. Hopefully it was bought at a bargain since 2010 begins this week. Anyway, this book is a must have for a federal employee, especially any new federal employee. It covers Pay, Insurance, Retirement, Leave & Benefits, TSP, Sepatation, Roles and Responsibilities, and a whole bunch more.

I've been a federal employee for many years now and some of the things I've read here I'm learning for the first time. As a federal employee you are assumed to already know everything. This book doesn't so that. It spells it all out for you.

I don't think a person needs to get an updated copy each year, but if you get just one, that will probably serve as a good reference point for answering difficult questions concerning federal service.

PM vs. COR

Most who know me know that I wear many hats at work. My business card reads "Project Manager". My Annual Performance Review reads Program Manager. And I'm also a Contract Officer Representative or COR.

This is a complicated set-up because most people think that there is virtually no difference between being a PM and a COR, but I think they are really distinct roles. I will try to highlight the differences between them. I'll run each role across the 6 dimensions of project management:

As you can see, the differences are subtle, but important. Perhaps there are some situations in which the contractor does or delivers everything important for project success, but my experience has been that if you only focus on the contractor work you are missing a lot of the overall project. A lot of times I think the government personnel play the position of the COR and think that they are getting all the work done. I am not in that camp, but for people like me, it is difficult for me to tell you which hat I'm wearing at any given time. Since I perform as both the PM and the COR, I don't see much of a difference. It is all just work to me. But in situations in which they are different people, or when there is just a COR and no PM, I can see how things could easily break down.

Two Important Things

The first thing is...
Tis the season for holiday parties and merriment. Especially in the government sector we tend to have an hour or two in which we have some food and socialize. I have seen it where there will be 10 different parties on the same floor over a 2-week period. The important thing I want to draw attention to is in the plight of contractors. If you have contractors embedded with the feds, you should make a point of inviting them to participate in your holiday festivities. Think about it like this, you want them to be part of the team, committed to the mission all year long. Don't be inconsistent in the month of December.

I remember when I was a contractor working with and near the feds, and I could hear them in their holiday party. The party that they chose to not invite their contractors to. It was completely demoralizing to me. It communicated that, I was a part of the team when it was convenient for them to include me. So if you are going to have a holiday party, make a point of inviting the contractors to come. It costs you nothing, but it will help to maintain the team structure.

The second thing is...
I really expected to see a lot more negative comments about the Motorola/ Verizon Droid, and I have really been watching. But I haven't seen anything. I saw the MiKandi thing and that might prove to be negative, but I'm not going to download those applications. I saw that it can be hacked to get Root access, but that was inevitable. I've read that the developer community is frustrated with Google, but no matter what they are less frustrated with the Goog than they are with Apple right?

I've had the device for about 3 or 4 weeks now, and I find new things on it every day. It is so easy and intuitive that I find myself using it more and more. Then I read that Time has chosen the Droid as the Best of everything in 2009. I'm not telling you to abandon your iPhone, it could still be used as a paper weight or as a sculpture from the aesthetic period in contemporary culture, but you should get a Droid for communications.

Save Award

Vote today. The Save Award has 5 nominees that will be included in the President's budget. In my opinion, these are all good ideas and all should be done. Congratulations to each of these people with articulating simple, easily implementable ideas. The idea concerning the inspections and income verification for public housing hit closest to my heart, but these are all great ideas.

Click over and cast your vote.

Data.Gov

Read an article today that Federal Agencies Must Post Public Data Online from the Washington Post. This hasn't been well publicized and I must confess that while I knew about the new Data.gov service, I was not aware of the requirement. Essentially it is a low bar that 3 data sets must be provided by the end of January 2010. That is a relatively easy thing to accomplish.

So I went to the Data.gov website to take a look. What I was afraid of is that we were duplicating work already accomplished. I figured that the easiest course would have been to take data from an agency and post it up to the Data.gov website. To my pleasant surprise, that is not what has happened. Data.gov is merely linking to data that is externally exposed on the agencys' own websites. This is a very good thing because the thing that made me most nervous about this is data quality.

If I work for USDA and I post data, and then post that same data on the Data.gov website, I could run into a problem. Inevitably someone will identify a data issue that I will work to correct. The problem avoided in the way Data.gov appears to be approaching this is that there is one and only one copy of the publicly available data. Meaning that if USDA makes a correction to the data, they don't have to send the corrected data to Data.gov for re-publication. Good.

I embarked on an initiative to assemble all of the data we had many years ago when I worked at HUD. My State and Local CPD Information site is still there, but probably not for long as HUD is refreshing their website. This was my big aggregation point for all data related to the Office of Community Planning and Development including:

• CDBG Accomplishments
• CDBG Disbursements
• CDBG Performance
• HOME Income Limits
• HOME Rent Limits
• HOME Performance Reports
• HOME Quarterly Performance Reports
• Homeless Grant Awards
• Formula Allocations
• Census Data important to HUD

I am not claiming to have created any of this data. Rather, my idea was to aggregate it in a manner that helped it to be more consumable by real people with real questions. As such, I created pages like this:
http://www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/about/local/pa/index.cfm
so that if you are wanting information about the state of Pennsylvania, it is all right here at your finger tips.

That is what Data.gov is doing. They want to be a place that can help people to aggregate this data. If there is an opportunity to grow, it is in the way the data is sliced. Put yourself in the shoes of a real person, perhaps someone in city or state government. This person has questions she wants to answer. If she is in Maine, she will not be interested in data from California. Someone has to think about the questions we are striving to answer. If we are just trying to feed the national-level researchers, then this set-up is great. But if we want to create something that can help to answer state or local questions, not so much.

Familiar Tune

I read today that the Veterans Administration is planning a Wide-ranging IT Services Contract. The article seems very familiar, in fact, it sounds exactly like the HITS contract that was awarded to support HUD. I don't know if people from VA visit my blog, but there are a few lessons that can be learned from that experience. I think nobody will argue that the final result was probably better than the status quo, but it was more painful than it should have been.

Numero Uno, all of your contract documentation must be perfect. This means that the solicitation, the SOW, the technical evaluation and best value analysis must be perfect. This is the type of contract that will be protested if it is not perfect, so take the time to be perfect and avoid those issue.

2. Make sure you have really strong transition in and transition out clauses. As it was written I'm not seeing discrete sections for in and out work. This is kind of a big deal because they are looking at a base of 5 years and the option of 2 more. The issue that I would help them avoid is what happens after that 7 years. You don't want to be in a situation in which you are stuck with the incumbent, because, trust me, they will try to lock you in. You can avoid this pain by planning for their obsolescence now.

3. Something that makes me nervous is integration. I can't tell whether they are looking to make a single award to just one vendor or if they are looking to make more than one award. I anticipate that because if the security work it is probably two, but it could be more than that. Whenever you are looking at a multiple contractor situation you need to identify who has the responsibility to make it all work together.

4. Where is the Architecture work? Maybe VA doesn't need support services for their architecture, but as I look through the PWS I'm missing the architecture support. It could very easily be related to #3 above, Integration support.

5. They cite CMM level 2, but don't seem to be requiring it or using it as a discriminator. I would recommend prescribing this as a minimum standard.

While I'm identifying a lot of thing that can be improved, I think this is a good opportunity for the VA. I just hope they talk to some people from HUD to make the transition less painful.

Hybrids

I saw an article today that strikes at the heart of one of my beliefs. The article was essentially that Homeland Security is considering hybrid contracts that include a mix of performance-based elements and Time and Materials (T&M) and cost-reimbursement elements. This is indeed good news.

At issue here, and the reason it is noteworthy is because it is a sign that people are starting to wise up to the fact that we must match the scope of the work to the type of contract. Months ago I posted something about Choosing the Right Vehicle, I had no way of knowing back then that it would turn into a great pun, but it looks like the right vehicle in many situations is a hybrid.

<>Drum snap<>Thank you, remember to tip your waiters and waitresses.