The Cost of Bad Data Management

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   Governance   Strategy  

I am fortunate enough to work with a lot of different organizations, and that exposes me to a huge variety of different approaches to project execution. One of the recurring themes that I see is just how inefficient organizations are at some of the most basic elements of project execution. They become comfortable with the way that they have always done things and don’t take a step back to challenge themselves to find a better way. Virtually all projects today involve significant amounts of technology, and yet project management itself is often slow to embrace that technology, with very real implications on project execution costs and effectiveness.

Here’s a simple example. I work with a lot of organizations on risk management, and one of the first things that I ask for is a risk log. Most PMs have one, but they will provide a MS Word or MS Excel file for me to review. When I ask why they chose that format, the response is generally that they just used the organizational template that was provided for them. Most don’t see any problems with that approach, especially given that they frequently store the files on SharePoint or their equivalent collaboration tool where they can be updated by anyone on the team.

The fundamental concern that I have with this approach is that it fails to recognize what risk information really is--it’s data. There is …

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