Content from Stephen Reale: Ropes and Gray: stephen.reale@ropesgray.com:
Background:
I am currently a Senior Project Manager at the Boston based law firm Ropes and Gray. Ropes and Gray is a leading global law firm with approximately 3,000 employees, and 11 offices, including offices in Europe and Asia. I work within the Project Services Department, which is similar to a Project Management Office (PMO). The group includes 6 Project Managers (PMs), as well as 3 Business Analysts (BA) and 3 Quality Assurance testers. As a PM, my primary role is to facilitate the implementation of business and technology solutions across various departments, within the firm. Examples of recent projects I led include: 1) Replacing a Records Management System with a vendor solution, 2) Replacing the Conflicts Management system with a vendor solution, 3) Replacing an internal Partner communication site, using an internally developed solution, 4) Process review and implementation of automation tools to improve hours tracking and reporting for clients.
How to work together to get projects accomplished?
On our Project Services team, the PM and BA roles are well defined. In general, the PM is responsible for managing the project scope, schedule, and resources, as well as issue resolution, change management and status reporting. A business analyst primary focus is documenting and clarifying requirements, acting as the liaison between the technical team and the business stakeholders, and facilitating end user testing. At the start of a project, the roles and responsibilities of the PM and BA, (as well as other project roles), are discussed, agreed to, and then documented in a Project Charter.
Frequent written and verbal communication between the PM and BA is key. On our team, all the PMs and BAs are collocated in Boston, except one. Therefore, it is easy to walk over and touch base on any topic, and this works very well. Of course, we also use email, instant messaging and conference calls to communicate as well. We also share all project documents in an easily accessible central location so these documents can be referenced and updated. When communicating with other internal groups, email is the prime mode of communication, but we also utilize face-to-face meetings, conference calls, video calls and document sharing.
Another important aspect of PMs and BAs working together involves their interaction with key stakeholders and project sponsors. A PM and BA must determine who will be the main contact with the stakeholders and how the project updates and information will flow to them. Deciding this could be based on prior experience working with the stakeholders and comfort level.
How are you utilized within your law firm? (if applicable):
PMs and BAs are frequently assigned to projects that involve internally developed solutions, larger software evaluations, process improvements or significant operational improvements. In many of these cases, the PM will help organize the project scope and tasks, and also facilitate communication across these various groups. Similarly, the BA will interact with these groups to understand their requirements and needs. A project requiring a PM and BA can be quite complex. For example, if the firm is implementing a new technical solution that has various stakeholders and users from many departments, a PM and BA would be involved to assist. If there is a project that is contained within one department or business area, the communication and tasks can generally be completed by resources in that group.
Provide Real Life Examples:
The over-arching goal of the Project Services team is to support and lead projects to completion, and to successfully meet the business objectives outlined by the sponsors. To support this objective, the Project Services team has developed a project methodology to help bring structure and best practices to many projects. As a result, there is a portfolio of projects prioritized by Senior leadership to allocate our resources to. We have seen increasing requests for assistance as the PM and BA continually demonstrate their value. A key to this success is for the PM and BA to successfully partner with their project sponsor and key stakeholders. As with any complex project, challenges can arise and the PM is primarily responsible for assisting in the resolution or escalating to senior management. However, the PM will solicit advice and discuss issues with the BA during all aspects of a project, since the BA is often interacting more directly with the user base.
In addition, the PM often will assist to close any gaps between the requirements (written/ gathered by the BA) and the business sponsor or stakeholders expectations. The PM also ensures that the technical team fully understands the requirements, so they can develop appropriately solutions. The PM will facilitate requirement walkthroughs, reviews and even create simple tables to help close any gaps or clarify tricky topics.
Recently I worked closely with a BA to implement some enhancements to an internally developed system. The BA was able to document the open business requirements and work with the business team to prioritize them. The BA then helped the technical team understand the requirements so they could begin designing solutions. As the PM, I was able to organize the key required tasks and develop a plan to design, build, test, and implement the solutions that were developed. The communication I had with the BA was continuous and essential. We worked together to overcome a few curveballs and delivered the solution to business users, who were very appreciative of our teamwork.
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