The Right Way to Use Historical Data

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Topics: Estimating, PMO, Portfolio Management, Risk Management

From the very start of our project management careers, we have the idea drummed into us that we have to make sure that at the end of our projects the key project documents are archived for use in future initiatives. We conduct a lessons learned exercise to ensure that future PMs can learn from our experiences and we make sure that schedules, risk management plans, estimates, etc. are archived so that they are accessible as inputs and decision support for future initiatives. With the advances in technology (and particularly PPM software), in recent years this has become a much easier task than it was in the past.

However, there has to be more to it than just capturing information in a big database and allowing people to pull out and leverage any information that they choose based on their own unscientific criteria. The PMO needs to ensure that the information contained in that database of historical information is organized in a way that not just the data can be retrieved, but also that the context of that data can be understood. We need to ensure that we are using the right historical information to guide us, that the information is interpreted appropriately and even that the data that is being referenced is still relevant today. If we don’t, then not only may the information not help PMs, it could lead them to significant errors in their planning.

The right …

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