Making the successful transition from business analyst to project manager
Not all project managers want to manage projects forever. Sometimes they look to switch to a more technical hands on position with the team like the business analyst role.
Likewise, not all business analysts want to continue in the role of business analyst forever – looking to take on a higher level management commitment of the project and deal less with the daily team and customer oversight that the BA role is usually responsible for on most project engagements.
If you are considering a move to project management from business analysis, below are some of the key areas where – in my opinion – you’ll need to take some extra steps or will need to focus efforts on in order to make the transition as successful as possible as quickly as possible. I’ve limited it to five areas – please consider and share your own thoughts that come up as you read this.
Training and certification.
If the business analyst is truly certain about making the transition to full on project management then a good start would be to go through the proper training and certification. Getting your project management professional (PMP) certification is the likeliest best route to take. The applicant must document the proper amount of experience to sit for the exam but there many places that can assist you that and even get you trained and certified within 5 days – with a 100% guarantee that you’ll pass it and if you don’t you get to take it again door free.
Learning the software.
Yes, there will be software involved. It’s 2018 and you’re not likely to manage a project over 100 hours without using more than an Excel spreadsheet. Whatever software tool you prefer or your new project manager colleagues recommend or your organization (or customer) requires you to use, learn it and use it. They are all fairly similar and you mainly want to be able to input your tasks and their scheduled dates, connected the dependent tasks, add resources to the tasks and associate costs to those resources. Once you’ve done that, you should be ready to go.
“The first thing my boss said when I told him I was interested in getting my PMP certification was that if I was going to do it, he’d heard Cheetah Learning was the best.”