Business Intelligence as PM Decision Support

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.

  Business Intelligence   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

Project portfolio management software is one of the hot new trends in project execution. In recent years, the tools have become much more powerful, they have integrated powerful new functionality and--with SaaS models--they have become much more accessible. The promise of PPM has been out there for more than a decade, but finally it’s becoming reality. I can’t help but wonder what the next big thing is for these tools, or at least for the data that they contain. This month’s theme of business intelligence really got me thinking that there could be some exciting things possible if we combine a PPM database with a BI tool.

That’s what I want to address in this article, looking at ways that we can create a decision-support function for project managers through these two approaches--and how that might improve the quality of project execution.

A simple example
Suppose that we have just completed the project schedule for a business-critical initiative. We know that the timelines are tight, and it’s important that we hit the deadline. Clearly we are going to manage this project based on doing everything that we can to protect the critical path, but where are our potential problem areas? Not every task on the critical path is a potential time bomb, and not every potential time bomb is on the critical path. We need a way to flag those tasks …

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