Project leaders today can find data on nearly every element of project portfolio management. Information is available for a variety of purposes, such as benchmarking portfolio performance against other organizations, identifying resource consumption trends, and understanding how unique elements—regulatory compliance costs, for example—differ from one project to the next. Decision makers no longer worry about finding the data necessary to evaluate their portfolio’s health or operational efficiency. Instead, they risk overlooking the metrics that are most important to their project portfolio management efforts amid a voluminous flow of incoming data streams. Learn how to eliminate low-value data sources to build better business intelligence and boost your project portfolio performance.
If you’re struggling to understand how your project portfolio is doing because there’s just too much information to process and analyze, there are some key steps you can take to control and curate all those data sources.
Effectively managing your data overload starts with understanding what you want to know. Consider an organization where the project portfolio suffers from poor financial performance. In that scenario, leaders may concentrate on expenditure data and put other information streams aside, at least temporarily. This will provide a clearer picture of how dollars are being spent and where opportunities exist to reduce spending or increase the return on the firm’s project investments (or both).
Next, put the focus on the most relevant data for your business environment. As companies evolve, they typically update their processes to capture additional efficiencies and expand or fine tune their capabilities. To ensure your project portfolio remains aligned with your current operational status, review your datasets to see if they contain references to workflows that are no longer in use or have undergone notable changes. Relevancy matters at both the project and the portfolio levels, so do a deep dive to ensure forgotten data streams aren’t entering the mix along the way. In most cases, you’ll want to eliminate the information generated from outdated processes to ensure future project portfolio analyses are informed by pertinent data.
To understand what’s truly important, you should prioritize your data. There are so many different information sources to choose from and some firms take the easy route and use them all. The tendency to leverage too many information streams is even stronger as the number of projects within your portfolio grows. The result is often confusion and missed insights because so much unnecessary data is floating around. Consider if some of your data streams are redundant. Identify where overlaps or duplicates exist, prioritize the sources that offer the most suitable data, and eliminate the others. Low-quality data sources should also be removed. When picking from multiple sources, de-prioritize those that deliver old or incomplete information, or where the data is based on questionable methodologies or collection techniques.
Finally, develop a schedule to routinely assess your data sources. Tomorrow’s data needs won’t be the same as today’s. A routine evaluation of your information streams at the project and portfolio levels provides your team with the opportunity to continuously optimize and realign data sources with the project portfolio goals and business strategies that matter most. The information stream review step is frequently overlooked, in part because most of the activity happens quietly in the background. It also adds work to the team’s schedule, and when things are busy, it’s among the first tasks to be put aside. However, data overload can stress your team’s resources in other ways, potentially driving poor business decisions that ultimately reduce the value and effectiveness of your strategic initiatives. Your project portfolio will suffer over the long term if you don’t consistently control your incoming data streams and edit out those that no longer match your needs.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.
