Meet Kurt Penner

I’d like to thank PMI Manitoba for giving me the opportunity to share a bit about my career path, and some strategies for creative project delivery that we have implemented at Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure!

My career path in IT has included work in the private and public sector, starting as a quasi-deskside support/business analyst/Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) expert in the pharmaceutical industry, to business analyst (BA) and senior project management roles in the public sector. As a project manager/business analyst with Manitoba Labour and Immigration, I delivered the first online Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) application system.

I achieved my PMP in 2012 and In 2014, I took on a senior project manager/business analyst role with Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure where I delivered a number of workplace technology and business process improvement projects. My education is in business computing/business analysis and project management, I have always been interested in understanding the tech side. I’m not a developer but I often say I know just enough about code to be dangerous (and as a result leave the development to our experts!) 

In my current role as Manager, Major Initiatives and Standards for Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure’s Innovation and Technology Services (MTI ITS) Branch, I often find myself wearing multiple hats, even over the same day! I am responsible for project delivery, strategic portfolio management, business analysis, data governance, and even occasionally get my hands dirty with some database analysis or business intelligence reporting. The secret to our success as a unit is finding creative ways to advance our department’s needs, and to work with the enterprise IT decision makers to align our work with government wide IT initiatives.

The first thing that’s unique about our team is that we merge aspects of a Project Management Office and a Business Analysis Centre of Excellence. We look to hire multi-skilled team members that have a combination of project management, BA, and tech-savvy-ness to enable us to either scope, design, and deliver a solution, or to support internal low/no code development experts in translating business requirements to SharePoint, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and data solutions.

Rather than creating a separate Project Management Office and BA resource team, we realized that our team members overlapped both skill sets, and we decided to deliver support through a BA Centre of Excellence that also is responsible for standardizing project management templates and deliverables. It’s a unique approach and it empowers the more experienced BA’s to take on leadership roles and have a hand in building new processes and templates.

We struggle daily with figuring out “how much documentation is too much documentation”, especially for more agile projects which rely on real-time user collaboration and prototyping to craft a solution. We’re delivering a combination of large projects like a new construction project management system where we collaborate with other departments and our enterprise IT team, to more compact initiatives like data-driven mapping tools to support our Hydrological Forecasting area. 

Creativity, innovation and figuring out new ways to use the tools at our disposal drives everything that we do.

Here are some of the things that make our area unique:

People  - Our team is made up of highly motivated people that have a genuine passion for discovering new ways of doing things.  We have a balance of process-driven business analysis experts, data wizards, agile delivery specialists and change managers (often at different proportions in the same person!) that love to research emerging technologies and can drive new ideas to adoption.  We also have collaboration both within our immediate team to share challenges and work together (especially when a solution crosses over multiple technology areas), and with our wider branch through our Business Analysis Centre of Excellence.  We support each other to deliver better results to department stakeholders. 

Skillset – Technology wise, our project managers and analysts are exposed to multiple technologies and encouraged to set aside at least ½ day per week to explore new ones.  Team members share their learning with each other as part of regular team scrum meetings and present to the branch at our staff meetings.  We have exposure to GIS, AI, business intelligence, data pipelines, SharePoint, Power Automate and Power Apps and are starting to explore Microsoft Azure and Fabric platforms. 

Relationships –  We have had success in building relationships with other departments (by inviting BA’s from other departments to share their successes with our BA Centre of Excellence, or sharing our tools, templates and processes with other IT units).  We have also created strong relationships with Digital Technology and Solutions (Manitoba’s central IT unit) by offering to pilot larger projects within our department, openly sharing knowledge together on applications and technologies, and aligning our work with the wider government strategy.  This collaboration and trust opens opportunities to explore new technologies together with enterprise IT.   It shows that our branch recognizes that departmental and enterprise IT units are not working separately on their own goals, but joined together as true partners.

We have found that there are significant advantages to having a combination Project Manager/Business Analyst role versus strict specialization between the two disciplines: 

• Effective business analysts need to understand how to create and execute a project plan. Developing requirements in isolation of what can realistically be delivered can create unrealistic user expectations and risk cost overruns or poor adoption of the solution.
• Project managers benefit significantly from seeing requirements and business process maps as more than a deliverable to check off from the Charter. They will get a better appreciation of stakeholder needs and be more equipped to evaluate whether the project solution will actually meet the need, and (with stakeholder support) propose an alternative path. 
• Building an effective BA plan is directly aligned with project management – defining deliverables, timelines, activities and objectives is critical to project success.
• Industry in general is moving away from “big requirements up front” in favour of using prototyping to pull out requirements that may not come to the surface in traditional analysis. Dual threat Project Manager/BA’s are closer to the ground in crafting the eventual solution path, and can evolve the project plan as they discover more information. 

I am proud to lead a strong team, and am excited for what we will build together in the future. I appreciate this opportunity from PMI to share some of my experience with you and look forward to hearing about your successes in your organizations!