Quality Project Data, Effective Site Communication and Integrated Risk Analysis
Not Just More Data, but Quality over Quantity
With every man and his dog now into data, there seems to be an invisible pressure on organisations to invest in data analytics systems but PM Alliance, a project management consulting services company is advising project teams against just collating more project data but instead to focus on good quality data. In the blog post, they have given 5 reasons why good project data is key more than ever before.
Once you have good quality project data, then producing meaning reports is the next obvious thing to do and with the BI platforms such as Power BI and Tableau now offering great functionalities and visualisations, your options are limitless. But again, you need to make sure your reports are meaningful and the type of visualisations or charts you use to display your data becomes important.
Jared Oakley has written a short LinkedIn article on how to create insightful charts and in it, he presents the same data using 2 different charts and boy, you will notice instantly that the choice of chart is key to getting your chart understood. In Jared’s words,
“If your chart requires an explanation, then it’s not a good chart.”
Still on the data theme, Varghese Daniel of Wrench Solutions has written an excellent blog post on how contractors can set-up efficient claims management system during the execution phase of a construction project. In his blog post, he opined that having the right data accessible at the right time to the right people was key in preventing and expediating claims and towards this, he outlined 4 steps to follow:
Plan for data-driven project management
Perform data-driven project management.
Monitoring and controlling the potential causes leading to claims and
Corrective and preventive actions.
Keep it Flowing at Sites
Poor communication strategy or management plan on construction project sites is a recipe for disaster with the attendant risk of safety issues, low productivity, inaccurate progress reporting and of course likely financial loss. And it is no wonder that Digital Builder, the construction blog from Autodesk has outlined ways to improve communication on jobsites.
Even though a good number of planners and schedulers are office based, we are still heavily reliant on the team at job sites to give us progress updates and reports, therefore according to this blog post, setting up a proper communication channel between the office and job site teams is one way to achieve effective communication on construction.
Advantages of Integrated Schedule & Cost Risk Analysis
Performing a probabilistic analysis of a deterministic schedule allows project teams to build contingency for schedule risks that are abound on a project. But most times, this schedule risk analysis is performed as a standalone exercise with the cost risk analysis of the project also carried out independently of the schedule. In this Safran Risk blog post, Fernando Hernandez outlines the advantages of performing an integrated schedule and cost risk analysis. He believes this integrated approach will answer 3 key questions projects need answered:
How likely is the project to finish on time and within budget?
How much contingency is needed to provide a reasonable level of confidence of making cost, schedule, and the two objectives combined?
Which risks are the cause of overruns and the need for contingency of cost and schedule?
This blog post contains a must watch video that demonstrates how to perform an integrated schedule and cost risk analysis.
Power BI Data Mask
Do you use Power BI and would like to hide confidential data in a Power BI report? Then you should read Gil Raviv’s blog post titled “Masking Confidential Data in Power BI Reports”. In his post, he outlines the advantages of using his technique to mask data and he also provides the M code that you would need to achieve the desired result.
