The results are in following my first Inside Go Daddy blog post on Project Owners! Project Ownership is a role we’ve coined at Go Daddy, consolidating the Project Manager and Business Analyst roles. The role spawned from my previous work experience, the Scrum Master role, and I found myself always striving to do more with less.
We spent the last quarter gathering data that would indicate whether our resources could wear both the Project Management and Business Analyst hats while managing the current project workload. We used a couple of different tools to gather the necessary data in an effort to prove our hypothesis, which is, yes they can!
First, we created a tool in-house to track where the Project Owners were spending their time. This data told us two things:
- The Project Owner consistently works on three projects per day. These three projects do not necessarily represent all of the projects on their plate, but rather the number of different projects that they worked on during any given day.
- The Project Owner consistently spent approximately 60% of their time doing business analysis tasks and the remaining 40% on project management tasks.
The second tool we used was a Kanban board focusing on the task-level details. Now that we understand where our time is being spent, we want to understand how long it is taking us to complete our Business Analysis tasks, which include requirements modeling, use cases, and wire frames, in conjunction with development and QA collaboration.
The cycle time metric suggests that, on average, across all active projects, it is taking us 13 days to pull the requirements together. These tasks are often happening alongside development design tasks. This tool helped us identify where the bottlenecks are and we believe we can reduce the duration of this process significantly.
With the third tool, we focused on the quality of the projects. The manager of our Project Owners created a survey to be sent to all stakeholders after a project deploys. The initial surveys were based on projects that have deployed and focused on two areas, quality of requirements and communication.
A total of 4 surveys have been sent thus far to a total of 29 members of the project teams (Dev, QA, UX, Product Manager, Marketing, and Communications). Of those, we’ve had 15 responses; so ~52%.
Overall, we are scoring in the 80th percentile in both areas. We obviously want to see a higher score. We are looking at a few key areas to bring this score up, including reducing workloads and instituting peer reviews of documentation and approach. To this end, we have partnered our Project Owners to review each others’ documentation and project management approaches.
The Project Ownership role is seeing success and also areas for improvement. The key to continued and greater success is, we are gathering data that we can act upon to make improvements. I look forward to next quarter’s data with hopes that we can drive our quality scores up and reduce our analysis cycle times.
Have you met resistance from individuals who want to continue wearing only one hat? Or how about those individuals who are really good at just project management or business analysis?
Bethany has an excellent question to which I’d love to hear the answer.
GoDaddy, I just stumbled across these articles and I like them – they are well written and informative. However, I’m not sure what your purpose behind allowing comments and questions is if you aren’t going to be involved in the conversation. Either disable it so it appears you are simply providing nifty info, or be involved if you actually want interaction here, which I think you should. You may find you also benefit from the exchange of information that will result.
You are one of the few companies that I deal with that consistently impress me with your assistance, particularly your happy helpful tech support crew. I do see us as partners, and I appreciate the wealth of knowledge and experience you have to share. Thank you!
Hello! So sorry it took me so long to respond. We are busy launching an MVP!!! Bethany – of course there are those who are not on board and doubt that the roles can be consolidated. But, for the most part, it has been embraced! I have found that good BAs naturally make good PMs, but there are many PMs in the industry who have an administrative approach to project management that does not lend well to writing requirements. Hope this helps.