Pro Tips for Data-Driven Decision Making

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Project leaders are faced with what seems like an onslaught of questions every day. But they also have a wealth of information that can help them find their way through the noise and set the best course.

RAMYAJIT DASGUPTA

Data analysis allows us to respond more effectively to these threats and opportunities, increasing the management’s confidence and significantly improving the value creation and the capacity of a company.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

The days of just going with your gut are long gone. Instead, project leaders and their organizations are looking at everything from risk registers to big data to help them make the right call. The challenge? Building teams with the skills and the mindset to turn that deluge of data into actionable insights. Only about 27 percent of organizations describe themselves as data-driven, according to a new survey from NewVantage Partners.

Today we’ll speak with a couple of project leaders about how they use data in their decision-making, beginning with Reuben Oshomah, West Africa regional director at telecom Avanti Communications in Lagos. Projectified^®’s Hannah Schmidt spoke with Reuben about his process for making informed decisions—and the ROI.

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HANNAH SCHMIDT

We’re talking all about strategy and decision-making today. Do you think the topic gets enough attention?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

I think it’s not being discussed enough, to be honest. I think we should talk about it more because sometimes we just jump into projects without understanding what the real value is going to be when it is done. So I think, yes, it’s under-discussed and we need to talk about it a lot more.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

How can not having the correct—or even enough—information derail a project?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

This can happen in a couple of ways. If you don’t have the right information, and you make [a] decision based on [a] lack of adequate information, then you will see that the value you ought to have realized would not be realized.

Also, in many ways, and in what I have seen, is that people go into [a] project not actually realizing the objective of those projects. And if you go into a project like that, I mean, I call it blindly, because most times you have sponsors just giving a project to project managers without letting them understand why it’s actually being done. And they’re actually done in isolation. They are done for a reason, for a cause. So if you don’t have that information of what exactly [is] the reason you’re doing that project, then you’re going to have a challenge in making the right decision.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

What kinds of information should project leaders be looking at?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

If you’re undergoing a project, you need to go and look at two things for me: lessons learned from similar projects and also the risk register. Once you have these two documentations, it will help you to know what not to do and how not to get into risk and challenges that have been encountered in similar projects.

So it’s very important that project managers look outside their circle to see the kind of documentation they can get to ensure they can actually use those documents to leverage and help run a project that they are running more efficiently. Because if you do that, then you will see that your project success rate is going to go up, and you’re going to eliminate most of the challenges you will have encountered if you did not use those project documentations that are available at your disposal.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

What about talking with team members or stakeholders? How can they help project leaders in making decisions or solving problems that come up?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

If you’re running a project and you come across an obstacle, you know that you need to make the right decision. You need to make a call. I need to engage my team, run it by my team members to see if they can give some inputs into how to resolve that issue. Or even it could be something that you need to speak to your project sponsor about and say, “This is the issue I’m facing. How can you help me in making the right decision?” as well.

So at every point in time, when you’re coming across a challenge, it’s good not to make decisions in isolation. If you make decisions with the input of your team, then it will help them in buying into it and giving you support. Communicate to them very clearly what the challenges are and seek their opinion so that it can help make an informed decision.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Tell me about a time when you had to make some strategic decisions on a project. What information informed your decision, and how did this decision or decisions impact the project?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

I was a program manager for Ericsson. So there were these two projects that were competing for resources. We needed some kind of expertise that were not readily available at that time. And when we analyzed the resources, I realized that I could only run one project at a time. That means the other one was going to suffer while that other one is going to move a lot faster. So I had to make a decision which of the projects is going to go ahead while that other one had to slow down a little bit.

Because I understood the objectives of the project—I was properly briefed on what’s the value the program was supposed to achieve—it was supposed to achieve a certain amount of revenue within six months of project delivery. So I looked at both projects, and I was able to calculate the revenue, month on month, when both of them have gone live. And I realized that one was going to realize that value in six months while the other one was not going to realize value in even one year. So I just reassigned those resources from one of them to the one that would give me that value in six months.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Let’s talk about advice to other project leaders. What are some ways that maybe they could strengthen their own decision-making skills?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

I believe that before a project manager embarks on any project, it’s good to go into [the knowledge] repository to look at similar projects and how they were delivered—like I mentioned, lessons learned from similar projects. It could be within the region, it could within the industry or the kind of technology. If you have that information and, most importantly as well, if you have a risk analysis or risk management tool where you can pick up the risks on similar projects and you can start from there. These two are very valuable to any project managers because what it does is that it increases your chances of being successful on that project.

Then one more thing which I’ve actually realized from a lot of project managers is that most of them, they get a project briefing sent to them and they just run with it. They don’t actually understand the business part of the project. Because remember, all projects, they are being embarked upon for a reason. It’s either you want to generate revenue, or you want to solve a problem, or you want to realize a particular kind of value. So every project manager needs to understand the rationale behind every project so that when it comes to making the right decision, because you’re armed with the knowledge of why your project is being created, it will help you work better as well.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

What about newer technologies? How do you see them changing how project leaders make decisions?

REUBEN OSHOMAH

One thing that can help us in decision making as well—there are business intelligence tools that can actually be used. So we project managers need to start looking at the right tools. Big data, analytics—that could be used to actually ensure that you make right decisions because these tools can help you a lot faster. They can bring a lot of data together to actually help you make informed decisions. I know that we still need to integrate or infuse that into project management more because if you have this, it will help you bring data together that can help to make some key decisions that will be important to the project delivery or project success.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

In PMI’s 2021 Pulse of the Profession^® report, 31 percent of organizations said data science skills, such as data management, analytics and big data, are the highest priorities for talent development. That shows the appetite and the priority for organizations to lean on data to inform decisions top to bottom, and it aligns with the experience of Ramyajit Dasgupta, global analytics manager at Concentrix, a customer experience solutions company, in Kolkata.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

Part of Concentrix’s mission is to help companies make data-informed decisions related to customer experience. And in your position, you’re working with project managers to analyze data, glean insights and then use that to inform the decision-making process. How would you describe that path from data to insight?

RAMYAJIT DASGUPTA

The proper use of the data can take the guesswork out of the decision-makings and also provide the tangible supports to the higher hierarchies, which can also guide the teams. Data can also provide me the value in helping the project managers, and also other managers as well, to schedule the work, allocate the resources. It can be used for further requirement of the projects, or in various milestones of the phases.

So the key means of the leverage of the data is through the use of the business intelligence and the analytics. The business intelligence is considered to be the descriptive form of the data these days, and in terms of the analytics also, in order to focus on the past and the present data to glean insights into what has happened or what is currently happening to the particular processes. So BI [business intelligence] gives the current project managers and the project management officers also the access to the real-time matrices to support better and the faster decision-makings and to achieve increased visibility into projects, process and their outcomes.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

How can using AI or machine learning help organizations analyze data and make decisions?

RAMYAJIT DASGUPTA

It’s all about the data-driven decision management, which is very crucial for any type of industry. It helps as an executive to see what will speed the production and to save the time or in other areas like telecommunication or like analytics. It’s the same. So the data-based decisions from the past information or past evidences to predict what is [happening] in the future, that is also a type of prediction modeling method. So the approaches can be the big data analysis, diagnostics models and the processing to enhance the excellent performance.

This approach helps people within the organization to know how the decisions are made. People can identify the implications of the data that is being collected, analyzed and also managed, and they have taken the actions accordingly.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What about project leaders or team members who understand the value of data but are less certain where to begin? What’s your advice to them in terms of first steps to really start using data to make decisions?

RAMYAJIT DASGUPTA

The benefit of moving into this data-driven field—the consistency over the time, the approach that helps the people within the organization to know how the decisions are made. People can identify the implications of the data that is being collected, analyzed and then managed. So as for someone who is new to this field, like from a project management professional [perspective], this data-driven decision management is crucial for every industry. So this is my take: You have to be very specific in terms of the datas. Whether it can be requirement gathering, it can be the collection of the data from the sources or through various analysis models. Sometimes it can be the data visualization also. Decision-makings based on the data—it will increase, and it will improve drastically for the coming years.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

These days, project leaders are faced with a sea of data. Now they just need to learn to ride the wave.

NARRATOR

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