Informed Work Management Decisions Require Trustworthy Data

Is your project data always trustworthy?

If you answered no, you're not alone.  That being said, most project managers I know are dedicated and motivated individuals who work very hard to make sure the information that gets pushed up to their executives is accurate and up to date.  In fact, I know of PMs who make the rounds every week asking, cajoling, begging, and imploring individual team members to update task status—and yet, they can still identify inaccuracies in the information collected.

If some data associated with project based work is questionable, is there a way to improve the overall trustworthiness of the data used for decision-making?

I believe that there is.  I also believe project management software can provide the solution—provided software vendors are willing to reconsider how they approach the work management process.  Were you aware that next to accounting software, project management software is the second oldest software product?  It's been around for a very long time and has evolved into a sophisticated mix of capacity planning, resource management, and milestone tracking—creating project software so complicated that the average team member can't understand it, let alone use it.  Hence the need for begging and cajoling.

On the other end of the spectrum, easy-to-use collaboration tools that might be accepted by team members don't provide the robust business intelligence tools needed by executives to make informed business decisions.  Capturing the critical data that leads to smart decision-making requires that individual team members are engaged in the process with something that doesn't force them to jump through hoops or navigate a complicated maze of procedures.

In fact, the more difficult it is for individual contributors, the less business leaders will be able to trust the information.  However the same team members who struggle with updating task status in their company's project software will gladly update their accomplishments in Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter.  Giving individual team members an easy-to-use way to update their accomplishments and capture status will give project managers and executives confidence that the information they are looking at is accurate and up to date.

What are you doing to keep your project data accurate and up to date?