Project Management | Project Managers

Not too long ago, there was an article published in Project Times about the role of a project sponsor and his/her relationship with the other project team members, "Project Sponsor as Core Team Member". I differ very much with the opinion presented in this article, as it perpetuates a vision of team work that, for me, has nothing to do with the true nature of the relationships that exist between the many stakeholders who journey together in a project, nowadays. It perpetuates a vision of "project order" that does not seem to be in line with the new 'chaordic' paradigm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaordic) that has emerged at the beginning of the 1990s and that is now accepted, by a majority of managers and employees I meet, as "how the world really works now".

During a recent client visit I encouraged the use of modeling as a way to uncover hidden requirements and expectations. One of my clients expressed her rather strong opinion that modeling requirements was not and should not be a part of business analysis work. Oh, she could accept the fact that uncovering gaps between the "as-is" and "to-be" using process models made some sense, but she was adamant that this gap analysis should be done by a business SME, not by a business analyst (BA). As to data modeling, well that was technical in nature and if done at all, she said, it should be done by the technical IT staff. Use cases were helpful to the testing staff, but were clearly technical and were not to be done by BAs. Prototyping? This should be done by developers-no question about that one!