8 Ways to Broaden Your Skill Set: Do Your Own Data Science!

Paul has run a plethora of projects in multiple industries throughout his 20-year career, ranging from process improvement to agile to most recently cyber-security. Paul is also a reputable speaker, drawing practical and humorous conclusions from the "trenches" of his employers. Paul's dedication as a PM practitioner started decades ago, when he became one of the first 10,000 people to earn the PMP.

  Career Development  

Does the phrase “other duties as assigned” in your project management job description include working with data? In looking into the future, PMI has identified “digital disruption” as a global megatrend, and two of the top six digital-age skills are “data science skills” and “ability to make data-driven decisions.”

This is very relevant to project managers today because:

• There won’t be enough data science specialists to meet the demand
• Data-driven decisions are not just needed for just operations, but projects as well
• Traditional data extraction and analysis processes will not move at the speed by which project decisions need to be made

Hence, data skills open up the door for project managers to go “hands-on” with a project and enhance their value to employers. In many cases, the ability to extract raw data from sources—coupled with average PC literacy—is all that it takes to meet the data needs of a project. The most basic needs can be accomplished without knowing SQL or how data warehouses are structured. Here’s how you can contribute:

1. Always look for opportunities to use data to support a problem statement.
I once heard a manager say, “In God we trust. Everyone else? Bring me data!” Nothing silences the critiques like shedding insight on a problem …

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