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?
You can’t trust everything you read.
There’s a very interesting point here, and that’s that project team members are happy to update their accomplishments in Facebook, etc. They’d do so in their own words, of course, and in their own format, without pressure from management. This only just occurred to me from your post, Ty, so thanks. When the PM asks for status, he/she usually does so with a specific format and language in mind. That format and language is usually driven by the language of the stakeholder. “Don’t,” for example, “tell me about how you updated to the latest version of MQ; tell me about how the business can trade a new product. Or carry a higher risk tolerance. Tell me what you did in business terms.” Often IT staff don’t know how to do that so it falls to the PM to translate. The PM may not have the depth of knowledge to do that, so they push the language of the status report back down to the team. The status report becomes not just an exercise of reporting accomplishments, but reporting accomplishments in a specific language that’s not native to the author. No wonder they’re such a PITA to get. But if those same people can blithely report status to a Facebook update in their own language without fear of criticism? Hrm. How much of status reporting can be alleviated with software, and how much requires more of a considered, sequential approach? Can workflow assist with that?
I agree Geoff, but I think the challenge is even more than just the interface or the language people use. Part of the reason that folks are so willing to share their status with the world in Facebook is that they get almost instantaneous positive feedback from their friends. Post an accomplishment in Facebook and see how many kudos you get from anyone in your network_
The process of status reporting needs to be clear to the team, including the how the information would be used and the benefits that the organization can acheive with it. During my experience with project management I always tried to make the teams to understand that the effort information could be helpful to them. With an accurate effort information, the PM could make future estimations of tasks (effort and time) more precisely, giving to then better conditions to execute their jobs with less pressure and better quality.
Thanks for contributing to the conversation Luis Felipe.
Geoff, I think you misinterpreted Ty’s article as no where in this post has he been suggesting that project team members have actually been observed to use Facebook to update their accomplishments. All he was saying was the suggestion that they might be more willing to use Facebook rather than update their project status in project management software. This suggestion, however, still needs to withstand the real litmus check, i.e. verified against real life and be substantiated by credible research. Until then it is only a proposition, one that should not be taken as a factual basis for further speculation