Getting started in project data
Summary
Imagine a world where data from previous projects predicts where future projects are likely to diverge from the plan. Where we understand the return on investment and long-term benefits realisation or know where best to invest contingency. These insights are encapsulated in the experience we accrue through projects.
Often, we distil this down into selective abstracts and call it lessons learned or codify it in processes, methods, and handbooks but we all know that there are complex relationships and cause-effects that exist that are difficult to summarise into a paragraph, page or book.
We can now deploy the latest methods in data science to find patterns in data that help us to gain insights that would otherwise have been difficult to uncover. Data analytics can give project professionals new superpowers. This may sound far-fetched, but such uses of data analytics are already being used on projects and are well established in other domains.
Imagine as a step along this journey you can access all your project information within three clicks of a mouse, without logging in to multiple systems or searching through your emails for an attachment.
Imagine fully automated daily reports and the extra time your site supervision will have to manage safety and increase site performance. Imagine, also, that your project management office (PMO) have set up role-based data rules that trigger automated actions to your team, effectively ensuring a standardised minimum expected level of performance with little ongoing effort – both for the customer and the contractors. Performance will increase, mistakes will decrease, decisions will be quicker.
The project management community want predictable project performance and better outcomes. We should always know, before sanction and during delivery, the likelihood of our project being a success, however we don’t currently, as proven by academic literature.
This guide aims to explain how data analytics can help projects and what you can do to get started.