1. How do you ensure that your project is on schedule to meet the deadline?

Project Planning is key to tracking any project’s progress. Keeping an eye on every stage of the project confirms that we are on the right path to deliver the project within the decided timeline.

The project Manager plans their project using GANTT Chart wherein resource activity is tracked against a defined timeline.

To ensure that the project is on schedule, the business analyst and the project manager must ensure that every stage of the project is well-defined. Also, he needs to ensure that the requirements are correctly explained to the dev team and other team members.

We need to ensure that the project scope* (Time, Resources, and Budget) is well understood by BA to avoid any scope creep and he/she should be capable enough to own the responsibilities and cater to the client’s needs.

Understanding of Requirements-

To execute the project on time, it is the responsibility of a BA to focus on the needs of the client and while meeting with stakeholders, he should keep the following points in his mind-

1. Always listen to the stakeholder
2. Always put the right question using the 5w-1h technique
3. Never interrupt while a stakeholder is sharing his point
4. BA should do his analysis and make some questions before meeting stakeholders
5. BA should always question the existence of the existence

Prioritization-

Post elicitating the requirements, BA should know which requirements are important and he should be able to prioritize the requirements using Kano, Ranking, or MOSCOW technique, according to the client’s demand.

BA plays an important role in every stage i.e.,

Pre-project
Planning estimation and assessment
project kick-off
Requirement gathering
requirement analysis
design
coding
testing
Deployment

During every stage, he makes some artifacts (BRD, SRS, RTM*, TEST CASES, etc.) and analyzes his own to avoid any Risks*.

(*Risk-As we know a Risk is an uncertain event that directly or indirectly impacts the project. Risk can be categorized as financial, operational, Market risk, credit risk, etc. and in terms of Business analysis, BA risk, process, and project risk also fall into this

BA should know the capacity of risk that can be considered in a project.)

Tracing the requirement-

During every stage, Business analysts maintain the RTM requirement traceability matrix, and being the sole owner of it, BA traces the progress of every stage. Refer to the below screen-

Information-

Adding further, keeping every team member informed about the project stages is also important. Thus, meetings are scheduled within the teams wherein appended points are discussed to avoid any risk

• What is achieved on the previous day
• What is the target for the day
• Any impediments faced to achieving the functionality
• Any conflict within the team or with others

Meeting with stakeholders–

it is the responsibility of the BA to make comfortable their stakeholders and ask about the frequency of updates they want from the project team.

Accordingly, weekly, Bi-weekly, or monthly meetings are scheduled to update the project progress.

Challenges- in this profile, we know that there are multiple challenges faced during the project and BA should know how to overcome these challenges to deliver the project within a defined timeline.

Timesheet- to give a proper update on the working hours, the timesheet should be well maintained and should be submitted timely to the client.

In addition, BA should be well-versed with the tools* he uses for delivering the tasks. As his skills play a major role to deliver things correctly.

(Tool*- MS office, MS word, Google Docs, Axure, Tableau, JIRA, MS-Visio, Balsamiq, etc.)

Concluding to above for delivering the project on time, we should focus on the best Project Planning and should keep a track of every stage to avoid any risk.