and manage the ongoing performance of their projects. By providing this timely, accessible, and in-depth information, he found that project managers were better able to understand what was driving their KPIs, establish more accurate budget forecasts. There, he led an initiative to redesign the company’s dashboards to give project managers access not just to KPIs but also the more detailed descriptive data behind them. This was a familiar problem: One of us (D’Cruz) had recently navigated it in role as senior manager of analytics at Honeywell Inc. Their responses indicated that while they leaned heavily on these reporting platforms - a majority used them almost daily - nearly three quarters felt that their dashboards were missing the tools they needed to succeed. In a survey conducted to better understand the importance of analytics in project management, we acquired feedback from 25 practicing project managers across industries including pharma, manufacturing, technology, and health tech. Business leaders struggle to find a balance between dashboards that take sweeping views of operational or financial indicators and those filled with detailed KPIs or a tight focus on particular indicators.ĭespite the growing reliance on dashboards for managing projects, we found that a majority of project managers feel they don’t have sufficient decision support from analytic platforms to effectively manage projects. Recent research has shown that managers and executives have trouble extracting fuller potential from the information provided in dashboards. Users may ask, “Why are my KPIs in the red zone?” or “What is causing our performance to be so far from our estimates?” but access to the underlying data is typically not part of the dashboard functionality. Simply put, the available information provides an update on what is, or what has happened with a key performance indicator. On top of that, dashboard reports provide retrospective information. They can include too much data, producing information overload and making clear decision support difficult. However, despite their advantages, dashboards also often have limitations. ![]() Dashboards’ underlying components (e.g., data sources, analytics, and functionality) have rapidly improved, too, as the digital era has produced additional descriptive data sources, enhanced real-time data feeds, and robust visualization, all of which make them useful to a wider and wider audience. Project managers can more easily see variances between actual and expected metrics that signal process breakdowns, allowing them to more quickly take necessary actions to maintain project progress. They provide timely and easy-to-understand numeric and visual reports of KPIs corresponding to project activities, offering stakeholders a high-level view of essential metrics that show them the state of project performance. As such, project managers increasingly rely on activity-based dashboards for reporting timely and user-friendly information to project stakeholders who want to understand how project activities affect interim performance objectives.ĭashboards have an obvious appeal. ![]() To stay competitive, companies have increasingly adopted an agile project management framework - and access to timely and relevant information is more valuable than ever. ![]() Today’s organizations are under pressure to adapt their infrastructures and processes to a more digitally based, dynamic marketplace.
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