BI and the Project Lifecycle

Mike has more than 12 years of project management experience spanning a variety of industries. He has acted as a consultant for federal, state and local government agencies; set up a PMO and managed strategic projects for a major automotive company in Australia; and currently is a Senior Project Manager in the Northern Colorado financial industry. Mike is PMP certified, a veteran of the USAF and has an MBA in finance and accounting.

  Business Intelligence   Lessons Learned   Strategy  

Business intelligence refers to an array of methods, theories and technologies that gather numerous data points and translate them into information useful for the measurement of business performance and the identification of opportunities for improvement. Business intelligence goes hand-in-hand with project management in that the identified opportunities often result in the charter of projects to address them.

Let’s take a broad look at how business intelligence is used in project management to improve performance and focus efforts on activities that garner positive results for the organization. Although business intelligence should shape your efforts throughout the planning and implementation phases, I will specifically address the two phases that I believe get you the quickest and most easily measured results--project initiation and project closeout.

Before we begin, let’s make sure we are on the same page. The term business intelligence is often used synonymously with competitive intelligence, the distinction being competitive intelligence is outwardly focused while business intelligence is inwardly focused. For our purposes, I will use the term business intelligence to broadly include competitive intelligence as a subset.

Project Initiation
Before a project is ever commissioned, someone has an idea they believe will provide some benefit to the …

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