Analytics needs to be well embedded into business culture, from strategy making to project management.
Effort estimation - How do the method of estimation and type of
project correlate with the actual effort? What is the deviation in effort like? Can you do some analytics in requirement
gathering? If a business had historical project data, you could use analytics
for resource demand, work, task duration, portfolio selection, resource
availability, etc,. By its very nature, each project is unique, which means it
runs into unique problems, unique risks, unique stakeholders, unique cultural
differences, etc. In order to provide useful predictive analytics, you need to
have a very decent sampling size, and you'll have to do some complex
statistical analysis.
Monitor & Control: The use of analytics in a project would more likely fit into the monitor & control phase of a project that demanded the
level of metrics. In order to
successfully use it, you'd have to first identify your goals, set your project
on a path to meet those goals, then report on the progress in regular intervals
(every week, month, quarter, etc.) and address any shortcomings along the way
through a change process. You may also use analytics to some degree in the risk
management of a project to identify when it's not meeting the goals and
implement a mitigation plan.
Measuring compliance to the guideline, or methodology of the organization would be
critical data for the PMO and sponsor, so that you can show direct correlation
between following or not following a Governance Model and the 'value-add' of
the project. The PMO needs to define how it can add value to the organization
and help the project, governance and management teams to deliver what your
customer wants, as well as achieving the organization’s strategic vision by
capturing and analyzing these metrics, and mapping their outcomes against KPIs
where appropriate. The ability to
effectively capture the metrics for analysis is as important as defining the
metric/KPI, which may require changes to business practices and buy-in from
stakeholders.
Thus, there are
varying areas of project management where analytics could help bring out
insights: Understand scope and end state. Strategy always drives Tactics.
Understand and map current KPIs and SLAs. Build the same for the target
environment. Measure your budget and schedule and honestly report it every week
to your teams, SMEs, Stakeholders and PMO. There would be additional value
gained as the metrics would provide earlier visibility to potential risks and
issues. Another example would be that projects that trend toward extensive use
of the governance and change processes ( especially around requirements) would
certainly be something that might indicate the 'Requirements Gathering and
Documentation Process' needs to be revisited and perhaps tweaked a bit. Still, Even
if you do all of these, there is no guarantee that the analytics are going to
give you a way of predicting how a project will progress because there is a
very human aspect of running a project ... almost an intuition which is
developed over years of experience.
0 comments:
Post a Comment