The Rise of Project Intelligence and Why It Matters

There’s a lot going on in government today. The economic pressures agencies feel from the uncertainty of budget cuts and sequestration effect every part of an organization, including the Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO is responsible for monitoring and administering government IT projects. As time goes on, priorities shift, technology advances, and new regulations are imposed, all of which make planning and executing projects more difficult. For example, think about your own projects. How many boxes do you need to check and hoops do you need to jump through to ensure you comply with new regulations? While new regulations and technology advancements can be a good thing, they add an additional layer of complexity to already complex projects.

To overcome some of these pressures, particularly new regulations, many in the PMO world are adopting a new approach- Project Intelligence (PI). According to a new Oracle Primavera white paper, The Rise of Project Intelligence: When Project Management is Just Not Enough, “PI uses Business Intelligence methods to leverage historical project data to make more informed decisions and greatly enhance project execution.”

Currently, project managers plan and forecast the possible phases in an execution cycle. However, most project managers don’t have the proper tools to do this as effectively as they would like. As the white paper noted, “The underlying deficiencies in most forecasting approaches are that 1) the PM fails in most instances to leverage historical data and 2) the PM doesn’t employ current Business Intelligence tools.” PI seeks to overturn this by combining modeling tools used in Business Intelligence for projects with the understanding of Emotional Intelligence for managing people.

Simply put, Project Intelligence is built off four main pillars:

1. Actively use historical data to forecast project cycles
2. Understand the intricacies of complex projects
3. Enhance social and emotional intelligence in projects
4. Actively use Business intelligence tools

In future blogs I will break down these four pillars, discuss the importance of emotional intelligence and provide best practices for improving projects, specifically in terms of communication. For now, I encourage you to download the free report here.

Are you doing any of these in your organization? How are you leveraging historical data to forecast projects?

Oracle’s Primavera provides enterprise investment management technology that allows government agencies to propose, plan, and control investments that present the greatest value to both the agencies and the public they serve. With Primavera enterprise project portfolio management solutions, national and local governments can effectively manage time, costs, resources, contracts, and changes to all types of projects or programs—including management of IT investments, grants, military systems, capital facility projects, maintenance and improvement programs, and more. Learn more here.