What’s difference if you promote from Systems analyst to Project manager?

“Congratulations! You are promotion.” said your boss. You are happy because you got promotion from systems analyst to project manager. After the exciting you feel some fears and questions, what difference between systems analyst and project manager? What’s the duty and accountable of project manager?

If you are in small-to-mid size company or your projects usually be small-to-mid size and your team size are not greater than 2 people, you will not feel the different and you may do the same things as usual. So, I assumed that you are not working in such type of company or projects.

Do you know the difference of the job description between the systems analyst and project manager? For, systems analyst generally you are middleman among users and developers, assessing the needs of the end-user and translating them into programming or turning over the programming responsibility to the development project team. You will be focus on technical aspects, collecting and analysis the requirements, define scope, design the solution, lead and coach developers start programming or assist some programming tasks (getting your hands dirty), implement the solution, maintenance and support, etc. Then, you will report the project success to Project Manager. Boss happy! User happy! ….

Above listed you did in the project. You should follow a specified methodology depends on your company common practices. The most common method is the waterfall method to direct the SDLC (system development life cycle). But, do you know what the Project Manager do at the same time during project life cycle.

A project manager is a professional in the field of project management. Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. A project manager is the person accountable for accomplishing the stated project objectives. Key project management responsibilities include creating clear and attainable project objectives, building the project requirements, and managing the constraint for projects, which are; scope, time, cost, quality, resources, risks and customer satisfaction.

A project manager is often a client representative and has to determine and implement the exact needs of the client, based on knowledge of the firm they are representing. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues of scope, time, cost, quality, resources, risks and customer satisfaction, can be realized.

So, Project Manager acts as integrator of all aspects in the project. Project manager is be able to manage all the stakeholders in project team to achieve the success of the project. Now, you will understand that the responsibility of role change from systems analyst to project manager is shift from technical side mainly focus on deliver IT solution or deliverable and meet user requirements; to manage all aspects e.g. Manage expectation of stakeholder, manage and motivate project team, managing the constraint, set project baseline to prevent from behind schedule and over budget, etc.

Do you feel it’s quite different of the responsibility of Project manager with Systems analyst? At least you should not be only focusing in technical aspects. Project manager do not have to be specialists in the project’s technology. Some authorities indeed argue that project manager should be generalists because they thus have a better chance of understanding the project from a holistic point of reference. The more complex a project is – that is, the more subsystems to be integrated, the more tasks to be accomplished, the more technically challenging the components – the better suited a generalist will be as the Project manager. Surely, if you have technical expertise in your project, it must be have its competence edge.

I highly recommend ‘to be’ Project manager or Junior Project manager should have attend formal project management training as soon as possible if you never attend. The PMP@ preparation course will be better choice to obtain worldwide recognized certificate for project manager and get required technical skills specifically for monitoring, tracking, and controlling the project. The details you can find rich in Internet.