How to Move from Project Manager to Business Analyst

A project manager is responsible for overseeing the project from concept through to delivery. In reality, there is a lot of overlap between business analysis and project management roles, and many project managers are doing a lot of business analysis, especially if there is no formal business analyst assigned to the project team.

The Skills Project Managers Bring to a Business Analyst Position

Project managers tend to be strong communicators and have a lot of experience building stakeholder relationships with everyone from senior-level project sponsors to direct end users. Project managers also often have experience scoping projects and doing some analysis.

Oftentimes a project manager will find they’ve been filling both the project management and business analyst roles, and so their transition is one of formalizing their business analyst skill set and experience, and learning to focus more on the business analysis aspect of their role.

Opportunities for Project Managers to Expand Their Business Analyst Experience

To grow into a business analyst role, project managers need to explore the following types of opportunities:

• Invest more time on the business problem to be solved and business value to be realized by the project, instead of moving swiftly into planning, budgeting, and implementation.
• Helping stakeholders discover, analyze, and prioritize new requirements by getting into more of the details of what the business process and software solution requirements will be.
• Practice creating detailed requirements documentation, which you might currently be delegating to the subject matter experts or technical leads on your project team.

In general, as a project management professional you need to learn to focus more energy on the problem and solution, and less energy on planning out how the solution will be created and delivered.

From Project Manager to Business Analyst: Landing Paid Contract Work and Building a Work Portfolio During COVID-19 with No Technical Background

Becky Goll left her project management role late in 2019. In 2020, she tackled the challenge of a pandemic and leveraged her participation in The Business Analyst Blueprint to land paid contract work during shelter-in-place orders, even while she was recently unemployed. She left the program with a work portfolio she can show to future employers

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>>How to Learn the Foundational Business Analyst Skills

When you join The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program, you’ll gain real world experience in the industry-standard techniques and business analysis processes.

>> Click here for more information about The Blueprint <<