Data? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Data! (Or Do We...?)
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.
When ProjectManagement.com told me that this month’s theme was data management, I instantly groaned [Editor’s note: true story!]. Sometimes these themes truly resonate and I find myself with any number of topics that I could write on, but data management didn’t quite get the creative juices flowing in the same way. So that in itself got me thinking, why did I have that reaction? Why did I not immediately think of a number of topics that might stimulate some thought and discussion? The simple answer is that I am one of a large number of project managers who have traditionally viewed data as a barrier to success, and that seems like a good topic to explore.
When I first started my project management career, there were two types of data that I had to deal with. There was historic project data that I was expected to consume as a guideline to planning my current project, and current project data that I was expected to capture and report. Both of these caused me problems--the historic data was expected to form the basis of my planning estimates, and there was an automatic assumption that the data was accurate and any significant variance that I had was an error on my part. Chasing down data on the current project (percent complete being a typical example) took me away from what I felt were the important elements of managing a project--creating the environment…
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