Who owns business analysts? - The debate is over.

Well, that is what I can say as far as our organization is concerned. After having experimented with placing Business Analysts (BA) with individual functions and then as an independent organization neither with functions nor with IT, we have finally merged our BA organization, which we called PMO (Project Management Office) with IT Systems group, which consisted of programmer analysts and system developers. We have called this group System Solutions Group. We have organized our Project Managers (PM), Business Analysts, System Analysts and Developers in four verticals where each vertical is a logical grouping of business systems based on their offering.

Hopefully, now we will be able to:

- minimize disputes between our erstwhile IT systems group and PMO
- give complete freedom & control to our PMs over the use of resources
- enforce focus and accountability on PMs, and their team members, and
- provide career path to our team members

Certainly having BAs with business functions or as independent functions had their pros and cons. However, we now believe this is the best structure.

Earlier blog entries on the same topic:
Sidewalk: Who owns Business Analysts?
Sidewalk: Who owns Business Analysts, the debate continues…