Transforming project success, exploring data enabled investment decisions webinar

The Governance SIG and PMO SIG held a webinar on Tuesday 28 February, exploring data-enabled investment decisions to transform project success.

The webinar was attended by 180 people who came to learn about how to use effective governance to unlock data for their projects.

The webinar was run via Microsoft Teams. This was the first in a series of events on "Effective governance, unlocking data and project success," it brought together three subject matter experts and leading thinkers from key APM specific interest groups on Data, PMO and Governance in a round table format.

Attendees benefited from the experts' discussion of the problem with project success, including the concept of reference class forecasting to inform investment decisions and the principle that "all projects are data designed and data enabled." Interactive surveys were included in the event to validate key problem statements and identify the data-enabled approach required for investment decisions, which will form the basis of understanding for future events in the series and publications on this topic.

Summary

The panel discussions highlighted the importance of setting realistic expectations and developing robust business cases for investment decisions, utilising historical project performance data to enable accurate estimating. RCF adoption was assessed as low by the audience, despite their understanding as to the important and value of the technique. Building and sharing data is critical to making better investment decisions, and making investment data available to delivery teams requires alignment, quantification, governance, quality, training, and capturing lessons learned. The discussions emphasized the need for a more rigorous and transparent approach to project management, changing the culture around using data, synthesizing risks across projects, and being more proactive in learning from past failures to prevent them in the future.

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Further Reading

For those looking to get into Data Analytics, or better understand the barriers to implementation, the following publications are recommended

How to get into project data analytics 

Barriers to project data analytics and how to overcome them

Post Event Write-Up
The topic of project failure rates can be a sensitive one. The event was not recorded to enable the audience to speak freely. Meeting summary notes were taken by hand, and with ChatGPT, developed into a summary write up.

#StrategicMisrepresentation

Engage with the series

• Unlocking project success: Addressing strategic misrepresentation to transform data-designed projects, 22 May 2023
• Cracking the code of strategic misrepresentation: Revealing bias in project success webinar, 11 September 2023
• Data, ethics and humans – solving the strategic misrepresentation bias in projects webinar, 17 May 2024

This webinar is suitable for professionals with any level of experience.

Previous webinars can be viewed on the APM Slideshare and YouTube channels. 

Follow @APMEvents for upcoming event information.

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