All in Management

Managing Data-Intensive Programs and Projects: Selected Articles

I’ve created this special compendium of posts that are relevant to planning and managing data related programs and projects. There are four groups:

Risk, Uncertainty, and Managing Big Data Projects

Anyone who practices project management for a living will recognize this list. It’s certainly not unique to big data analytics project. It is however reasonable to ask whether “big data” projects are unique in some way that exacerbates the probability of failure.
Still, knowing that data exist – which is what the inventories will tell us — is not the same as accessing and interpreting the data. Even assuming the public eventually gains access to the inventoried data, we’ll still need contextual information about the programs described by the data and measurement of the impacts these programs have.
In “IT governance is killing innovation” Andrew Horne and Brian Foster argue that IT project selection needs to move beyond traditional capital investment based ROI measures. The authors think it is more appropriate to take into account project support for critical business capabilities and that such a focus will be much more supportive of innovation.

Developing a Collaborative Approach to Improving Project Management Practices, Part 1: Culture

In Agile grows up and new challenges emerge author Rick Freedman points out what project managers, sooner or later, learn from the School of Hard Knocks: changing and improving project management practices to improve the likelihood of project success involves not just improved management methods but also cultural changes within the sponsoring organization.