Decision Making – Trusting Your Data

Making decisions is an inherent part of managing projects.  How those decisions are made, and the information that they are based upon, can make the difference between a successfully run project and a potential disaster.

Projects are comprised of hundreds, and potentially thousands of issues.  Where do you focus your attention for the greatest gain?

Your information or ‘data’ is only as good as the effort you put into keeping it current.  However, what you learn from your data can be the difference between managing by the skin of your teeth or managing your projects as a professional PM, making decisions based on facts.  It is the difference between following every goose-chase looking for the ones that might put your project at risk and identifying the real risks quickly and early.

In order for information to become project data it must be documented.

Project data is any documented information related to your project;  e.g., project plans, business cases, PMO documents, emails, logs decks, minutes, agendas, status updates, etc.

Project data is not hallway conversations, meeting discussions, gossip, innuendo, hearsay, body language, tone of voice.  Verbal information remains just that until the commitment to document it is made.  It is more difficult to deny something that was written or recorded than to deny something that was said.

The value of the data is directly related to the level of commitment behind it.  When project information is documented it is published for public scrutiny and does not rely on the accuracy of individuals’ memories.

The pareto rule is that 80% of the problems are the result of 20% of the issues.  To find that 20% you need to gather, organized, validate and analyze your project data.  Mine the 20% that will give you the biggest bang for your buck and delegate the rest.

This could be interpreted as ‘passing the buck’, but at the end of the day your job is to manage the project, not to personally solve every single issue that arises.  The 20% usually has a component whose consequences would directly affect the scope, schedule, cost or quality of the end product and by this definition falls under the jurisdiction of the PM to address.  The remaining will generally fall within the realm of responsibility of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) requiring a greater depth of knowledge / experience than a PM would typically possess.

After all, every project has a team.  Each team member is responsible and accountable for their deliverables and it’s the PM’s job to leverage their skills, talents and strengths by assigning them the issues to manage that are best suited to resolve.

For example, a working project plan with an unusually high number of tasks that are locked with “Start No Earlier Than” or “Start No Later Than” constraints will hide the true critical path, particularly if these tasks have predecessors and successors.

Article published in Project Times September 2007 by Sean Best, PMP, Project Management Professional and Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunications and software industries. He can be reached at exorion.solutions@gmail.com