The Importance of Data-driven Project Management

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”

•  Peter Sondergaard, Former VP of Gartner, Inc. 

In a world that is information-driven, there’s an overflow of data that is collected through various channels. Although collection of data is easy, making sense of it to find meaningful insights that can help your business and the leaders in decision-making is still tricky. While intuition is trusted by many decision leaders, data-driven decision-making does make a significant impact. Data helps us reduce bias caused by opinions, ensuring a balanced and informed decision approach toward decision-making. 

How data-driven project management enhances systems & processes

Let’s take an example of how data analytics, automation, and AI can aid in project management: 

The success of any project demands meticulous planning, strategic organization, and the availability of contingency plans in an era of uncertainty. Across the various stages of the project lifecycle, AI plays a transformative role by automating and streamlining repetitive tasks, including,

• Project planning: Optimizing resource allocation
• Scheduling: Task assignment
• Monitoring: Identifying potential threats, loopholes
• Implementation: Enhanced services through actionable insights

AI in automating tasks

Generative AI assistants can help you derive recommendations, summarize as well as offer actionable insights to deliver faster results. AI adoption can be boosted by enriching human skills. Gartner says that by 2030, almost 80% of the work involved in total project management will be eliminated by AI (1). By 2026, almost 80% of the enterprises would have deployed Generative AI-enabled applications. Project implementation will become easier, and faster as AI can help in scenario planning, risk analysis, and help in standardization (2). Besides, automation enables in monitoring progress, ensuring transparency, and enabling continuous improvement.

The role of data in risk assessment, decision-making, and performance tracking

Data-driven decisions allow organizations to make informed choices, detect anomalies, optimize customer insights, and enable real-time monitoring and competitor analysis. It brings in the following benefits:

• Robust data management: Enhanced security and accessibility
• Optimized allocation of resources: Efficiency and cost-effectiveness
• Data-driven insights: Innovation and personalized customer experiences
• Decision making: Agility and proactive strategy building for success

For instance, Amazon makes informed decisions based on customers’ purchasing data, by identifying their behavior across different touch points. Publicis Media, a large advertising group with global footprints is leveraging data-driven decision making to optimize their investment and manage fragmentation of data. 

How businesses can gain a competitive advantage through data-driven strategies

Data has tremendous potential. Businesses can gather customer information and offer enhanced products & services to their clients. Cloud has drastically changed how we collect services and has become easier to gather data. Data-driven decisions can help you make early market shifts and implement them over competitors to offer better customer services to their clients. According to Harvard Business Insights, your decision-making will become confident and you’ll be able to deliver the right message to the customer through data-driven decision-making (3). Besides, you can achieve cost savings and derive a pattern across different data points. 

For instance, the success of Netflix has been largely attributed to its data-driven approach. They personalize data content on the basis of content recommendations of their subscribers. They collect data on the shows preferred by the user, timing, whether the user resumed the series after watching it, and searches, i.e., it observes the customers’ journey at various touchpoints. Managing their content based on users’ preferences can be said to be major contributing factor to Netflix’s success. 

Data is often siloed and unconnected. Deriving meaningful insights from your data can be a time-intensive and complex process and you need reliable vendor software that can help you derive actionable insights from your data. 

Workrig’s Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Tool (4) offers comprehensive solutions for managing tasks, milestones, and financials. Besides, its unique features allow everyone to have a personalised project view. Its unique features:

• With role-based views for Project Owners, Team Leads, and Resources, it streamlines project execution while integrating with invoicing for milestone-based, fixed, or ad-hoc billing. 
• It helps you plan your project effortlessly while helping you check the resource availability and workload, facilitating the assignment of tasks, to launch the project with ease.  You can simplify workflows by using one tool instead of juggling worksheets, pivot tables, charts, etc.
• It offers comprehensive features including workforce metrics & productivity tracking and predictive analytics to forecast hiring needs. 
• Its collaboration tools enhance team communication to reduce misinformation and facilitate the project’s success. 

To sum up, continuous improvement and innovation can be facilitated through data-driven decision-making and Workrig can enable in fostering a data-driven culture. 

References

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-03-20-gartner-says-80-percent-of-today-s-project-management#:~:text=By%202030%2C%2080%20percent%20of,%2C%20according%20to%20Gartner%2C%20Inc.
2. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-10-11-gartner-says-more-than-80-percent-of-enterprises-will-have-used-generative-ai-apis-or-deployed-generative-ai-enabled-applications-by-2026
3. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/data-driven-decision-making
4. https://res.cloudinary.com/workrig/image/upload/v1621334044/WR-PPM-Data_Sheet_v4_ugzht7.pdf