How much access do you give BA/PM's?

Question

Where I work we have a little bit of a dilemma... I work on a small team developing an application for internal use. We recently just received a new PM to the project. She would like to have access to our database and our sourcecode (stored in svn). Our previous PM did not see a need, nor want, to have access to any of the things "in our sandbox".

Having said that, What is the proper amount of access to give a PM/BA? Is there a security breach of some kind with this? If you agree that the PM should have access to one or both, what kind of access?

I have thought on this for a bit and at first I did not want the PM/BA in my sandbox, but I have since went the other way in thinking what harm could it do? Am I incorrect?

Is this end a battle worth fighting?

Answer 1

Give her access. Make her check it out of source control and track her like anyone else. If she changes anything you'll have a history. If she makes suggestions about the implementation, it might help. If she's a bully and start ranting about the source code well... she probably would have found a way to do that anyway.

Answer 2

It really depends on how much the PM knows about programming. Some PMs I work for I would feel completely comfortable giving them full access to SVN, read and commit privileges. Other PMs I would trust them with read privileges, although I don't think they would know what to do with the code when they saw it.