Discover solutions to common obstacles faced by project managers. Written as a business novel, the book is highly interactive, allowing readers to participate and consider options at each stage of a project. The book is based on years of experience, both through the author's research projects as well as his teaching lectures at business schools. The book tells the story of Emily Reed and her colleagues who are in charge of the management of a new tennis stadium project. The CEO of the company, Jacob Mitchell, is planning to install a new data-driven project management methodology as a decision support tool for all upcoming projects. He challenges Emily and her team to start a journey in exploring project data to fight against unexpected project obstacles. Data-driven project management is known in the academic literature as “dynamic scheduling” or “integrated project management and control.” It is a project management methodology to plan, monitor, and control projects in progress in order to deliver them on time and within budget to the client. Its main focus is on the integration of three crucial aspects, as follows: Baseline Scheduling: Plan the project activities to create a project timetable with time and budget restrictions. Determine start and finish times of each project activity within the activity network and resource constraints. Know the expected timing of the work to be done as well as an expected impact on the project’s time and budget objectives. Schedule Risk Analysis: Analyze the risk of the baseline schedule and its impact on the project’s time and budget. Use Monte Carlo simulations to assess the risk of the baseline schedule and to forecast the impact of time and budget deviations on the project objectives. Project Control: Measure and analyze the project’s performance data and take actions to bring the project on track. Monitor deviations from the expected project progress and control performance in order to facilitate the decision-making process in case corrective actions are needed to bring projects back on track. Both traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) and the novel Earned Schedule (ES) methods are used. What You'll Learn Implement a data-driven project management methodology (also known as "dynamic scheduling") which allows project managers to plan, monitor, and control projects while delivering them on time and within budget Study different project management tools and techniques, such as PERT/CPM, schedule risk analysis (SRA), resource buffering, and earned value management (EVM) Understand the three aspects of dynamic scheduling: baseline scheduling, schedule risk analysis, and project control Who This Book Is For Project managers looking to learn data-driven project management (or "dynamic scheduling") via a novel, demonstrating real-time simulations of how project managers can solve common project obstacles

To manage projects, you must not only control schedules and costs: you must also manage growing operational uncertainty. Today’s powerful analytics tools and methods can help you do all of this far more successfully. In Project Management Analytics, Harjit Singh shows how to bring greater evidence-based clarity and rationality to all your key decisions throughout the full project lifecycle. Singh identifies the components and characteristics of a good project decision and shows how to improve decisions by using predictive, prescriptive, statistical, and other methods. You’ll learn how to mitigate risks by identifying meaningful historical patterns and trends; optimize allocation and use of scarce resources within project constraints; automate data-driven decision-making processes based on huge data sets; and effectively handle multiple interrelated decision criteria. Singh also helps you integrate analytics into the project management methods you already use, combining today’s best analytical techniques with proven approaches such as PMI PMBOK® and Lean Six Sigma. Project managers can no longer rely on vague impressions or seat-of-the-pants intuition. Fortunately, you don’t have to. With Project Management Analytics, you can use facts, evidence, and knowledge—and get far better results. Achieve efficient, reliable, consistent, and fact-based project decision-making Systematically bring data and objective analysis to key project decisions Avoid “garbage in, garbage out” Properly collect, store, analyze, and interpret your project-related data Optimize multi-criteria decisions in large group environments Use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to improve complex real-world decisions Streamline projects the way you streamline other business processes Leverage data-driven Lean Six Sigma to manage projects more effectively

Quantitative analysis of outcomes vs PMs at the individual level Leading Complex Projects takes a unique approach to post-mortem analysis to provide project managers with invaluable insight. For the first time, individual PM characteristics are quantitatively linked to project outcomes through a major study investigating the role of project leadership in the success and failure of complex industrial projects; hard data on the backgrounds, education, and personality characteristics of over 100 directors of complex projects is analyzed against the backdrop of project performance to provide insight into controllable determinants of outcomes. By placing these analyses alongside their own data, PMs will gain greater insight into areas of weakness and strength, locate recurring obstacles, and identify project components in need of greater planning, oversight, or control. The role of leadership is to deliver results; in project management, this means taking responsibility for project outcomes. PMs are driven by continuous improvement, and this book provides a wealth of insight to help you achieve the next step forward. Understand why small, simple projects consistently outperform larger, more complex projects Delve into the project manager's role in generating successful outcomes Examine the data from over 100 PMs of complex industrial projects Link PM characteristics to project outcome to find areas for improvement Complex industrial projects from around the world provide a solid basis for quantitative analysis of outcomes—and the PMs who drive them. Although the majority of the data is taken from projects in the petroleum industry, the insights gleaned from analysis are widely applicable across industry lines for PMs who lead complex projects of any stripe. Leading Complex Projects provides clear, data-backed improvement guidance for anyone in a project management role.

Data Analytics in Project Management. Data analytics plays a crucial role in business analytics. Without a rigid approach to analyzing data, there is no way to glean insights from it. Business analytics ensures the expected value of change while that change is implemented by projects in the business environment. Due to the significant increase in the number of projects and the amount of data associated with them, it is crucial to understand the areas in which data analytics can be applied in project management. This book addresses data analytics in relation to key areas, approaches, and methods in project management. It examines: • Risk management • The role of the project management office (PMO) • Planning and resource management • Project portfolio management • Earned value method (EVM) • Big Data • Software support • Data mining • Decision-making • Agile project management Data analytics in project management is of increasing importance and extremely challenging. There is rapid multiplication of data volumes, and, at the same time, the structure of the data is more complex. Digging through exabytes and zettabytes of data is a technological challenge in and of itself. How project management creates value through data analytics is crucial. Data Analytics in Project Management addresses the most common issues of applying data analytics in project management. The book supports theory with numerous examples and case studies and is a resource for academics and practitioners alike. It is a thought-provoking examination of data analytics applications that is valuable for projects today and those in the future.

DataOps is a new way of delivering data and analytics that is proven to get results. It enables IT and users to collaborate in the delivery of solutions that help organisations to embrace a data-driven culture. The DataOps Revolution: Delivering the Data-Driven Enterprise is a narrative about real world issues involved in using DataOps to make data-driven decisions in modern organisations. The book is built around real delivery examples based on the author’s own experience and lays out principles and a methodology for business success using DataOps. Presenting practical design patterns and DataOps approaches, the book shows how DataOps projects are run and presents the benefits of using DataOps to implement data solutions. Best practices are introduced in this book through the telling of a story, which relates how a lead manager must find a way through complexity to turn an organisation around. This narrative vividly illustrates DataOps in action, enabling readers to incorporate best practices into everyday projects. The book tells the story of an embattled CIO who turns to a new and untested project manager charged with a wide remit to roll out DataOps techniques to an entire organisation. It illustrates a different approach to addressing the challenges in bridging the gap between IT and the business. The approach presented in this story lines up to the six IMPACT pillars of the DataOps model that Kinaesis (www.kinaesis.com) has been using through its consultants to deliver successful projects and turn around failing deliveries. The pillars help to organise thinking and structure an approach to project delivery. The pillars are broken down and translated into steps that can be applied to real-world projects that can deliver satisfaction and fulfillment to customers and project team members.

In today's challenging commercial environment, many business projects are now categorized as strategic investment with the primary concern being value impact on an organization's bottom line. This title equips project managers with the skills necessary to effectively manage projects as strategic investments.

Your company's data has the potential to add enormous value to every facet of the organization -- from marketing and new product development to strategy to financial management. Yet if your company is like most, it's not using its data to create strategic advantage. Data sits around unused -- or incorrect data fouls up operations and decision making. In Data Driven, Thomas Redman, the "Data Doc," shows how to leverage and deploy data to sharpen your company's competitive edge and enhance its profitability. The author reveals: · The special properties that make data such a powerful asset · The hidden costs of flawed, outdated, or otherwise poor-quality data · How to improve data quality for competitive advantage · Strategies for exploiting your data to make better business decisions · The many ways to bring data to market · Ideas for dealing with political struggles over data and concerns about privacy rights Your company's data is a key business asset, and you need to manage it aggressively and professionally. Whether you're a top executive, an aspiring leader, or a product-line manager, this eye-opening book provides the tools and thinking you need to do that.

Starting from 2010 there has been incredible change in business environments with the development of cloud technology and artificial intelligence. We believe that these technologies will start affecting routine-based desk jobs intensively soon. Data-entry, operational-accounting and scheduling might be one of these areas. The idea of writing this book primarily raised from experiences which indicates that there is still enough time to waste with spreadsheets. Because each business runs for profitability and currently the cost of a large system changes cannot be afforded by majority of small and medium sized businesses. And each technology may not provide 100% automation for each task on time. You will learn the best project management practices on excel and will have free professional project management spreadsheet templates (i.e. Gantt, kanban, project planner). Finance and accounting are still seen as professions owned by a specific department of companies whereas real finance is run by operations themselves. Each team member and/or the leader or planner must be aware of the financial results of each action. Particularly, project managers must have adequate knowledge and hands-on experience on financial aspects of projects. For this purpose, the second chapter of this guide focus on financial concepts related to project management.

This book has two main goals: to define data science through the work of data scientists and their results, namely data products, while simultaneously providing the reader with relevant lessons learned from applied data science projects at the intersection of academia and industry. As such, it is not a replacement for a classical textbook (i.e., it does not elaborate on fundamentals of methods and principles described elsewhere), but systematically highlights the connection between theory, on the one hand, and its application in specific use cases, on the other. With these goals in mind, the book is divided into three parts: Part I pays tribute to the interdisciplinary nature of data science and provides a common understanding of data science terminology for readers with different backgrounds. These six chapters are geared towards drawing a consistent picture of data science and were predominantly written by the editors themselves. Part II then broadens the spectrum by presenting views and insights from diverse authors – some from academia and some from industry, ranging from financial to health and from manufacturing to e-commerce. Each of these chapters describes a fundamental principle, method or tool in data science by analyzing specific use cases and drawing concrete conclusions from them. The case studies presented, and the methods and tools applied, represent the nuts and bolts of data science. Finally, Part III was again written from the perspective of the editors and summarizes the lessons learned that have been distilled from the case studies in Part II. The section can be viewed as a meta-study on data science across a broad range of domains, viewpoints and fields. Moreover, it provides answers to the question of what the mission-critical factors for success in different data science undertakings are. The book targets professionals as well as students of data science: first, practicing data scientists in industry and academia who want to broaden their scope and expand their knowledge by drawing on the authors’ combined experience. Second, decision makers in businesses who face the challenge of creating or implementing a data-driven strategy and who want to learn from success stories spanning a range of industries. Third, students of data science who want to understand both the theoretical and practical aspects of data science, vetted by real-world case studies at the intersection of academia and industry.

No project management training? No problem! In today’s workplace, employees are routinely expected to coordinate and manage projects. Yet, chances are, you aren’t formally trained in managing projects—you’re an unofficial project manager. FranklinCovey experts Kory Kogon and Suzette Blakemore understand the importance of leadership in project completion and explain that people are crucial in the formula for success. This updated and revised edition of Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager offers practical, real-world insights for effective project management and guides you through the essentials of the value, people, and project management process: Scope Plan Engage Track and Adapt Close If you’re struggling to ensure multiple projects are finished with high value and on time, this book is for you. If you manage projects without the benefit of a team, this book is also for you. Change the way you think about project management—"project manager" may not be your official title, but with the right strategies, you can excel in this project economy.