What is predictive analytics in project management?

If you ask me, predictive analytics in project management is software functionality that helps managers see beyond their capacity. IBM experts define predictive analytics as a way to “discover patterns in data and go beyond knowing what has happened to anticipating what is likely to happen next.”

While I understand that there are projects that last less than a year, lots of construction, aerospace, finance, or software initiatives take years to reach the finish line. People assigned to manage such complex projects lack the ability to see the project landscape until they find a proper tool. Contractors, in turn, risk delivering a pig in a poke.

That’s precisely when project forecasting tools come into play.

To understand how predictive analytics evolved in project management, let’s travel a few years back to when, where, and, most importantly, why it became a trend.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the increased innovation-led competition has called on businesses to revamp their old approaches in favor of the new ones. Companies started to look for efficient ways to secure their competitive stronghold and advance business capacity. Sitting on huge volumes of data, many realized that the trove of available project information was a valuable asset.

According to MathWorks, “Data-driven predictive models can help companies solve long-standing problems in new ways.” Project management is no exception and a variety of machine learning algorithms are applied specifically to anticipate cost overruns, forecast resource needs, and make time tracking effortless.

That’s why predictive project analytics is pretty much equivalent to the lever in the time machine that could allow project managers to travel in time.

Deloitte was the first in a class of its own to introduce the notion of predictive project analytics (PPA) for the sake of reducing project risks, especially in complex projects. Deloitte consultants are of opinion that knowing key factors that cause project failure, it’s possible to build tools that benchmark project success. I agree with them on the following:

Research shows that project success hinges on a range of factors, including the project’s inherent complexity, the project team’s capability level and the maturity of existing controls and governance processes. So it stands to reason that your organization could mitigate project risk, reduce the incidence of failure and close gaps if you could accurately benchmark your capabilities in each of these areas against similar projects. – Deloitte

The term first coined by Deloitte, predictive project analytics blazed a trail for many companies that further developed techniques of forecasting in management. Forecast project management has become a widespread practice among PM software providers.

Why do project managers need predictive analytics?

Project managers work in swamps of data – tasks, time estimates, priorities, milestones, capacity, workload, costs, and other digitized variables. According to Clive Humby, a UK Mathematician and architect of Tesco’s Clubcard who coined the phrase “data is the new oil,” data is valuable only if it’s broken down, analyzed, and refined. So far, in project management, a possible way to unlock the value of project data is to apply a predictive model to it. This will help project managers analyze their projects under various scenarios and, literally, create a simulation out of their programs and portfolios. If you’re thinking of developing your own project forecasting tool, it’s always good to engage with developers and IT pros who have experience in data science.

What predictive analytics certainly does is helping project managers answer a vast range of “what-if” questions that predict the possible outcome of the project if something has to be changed. Project forecasting software powered by predictive analytics will instantly move project managers in time to help them investigate the chain reaction and make decisions backed up by data when project cost management is under concern.

Ideally, a project manager armed with a project forecasting tool is able to detect floundering projects, find hot spots in project plans, and identify areas for improvement. Having access to this information (and the possibility for project managers to travel in time) grows the chance of setting and meeting quality goals.

Overall, a data-driven approach to project management helps businesses take confident momentous decisions and save millions of dollars of investments.

How forecasting applies to agile project management

Today, only lazy project managers haven’t tried to blend Agile into their context. It’s no secret that once applied, this methodology has a tendency to bring spectacular results to companies, willing to embrace change. Guy Maslen, the Head of Geohazards Monitoring Department at GNS Science, sees agility delivering a reduction in risk, “specifically the risk that we fail to create value.” According to Maslen, “The frameworks, practices, and culture place barriers in the way of human error occurring and minimize the consequences of an error should those barriers fail. We might still get things wrong, however, it will be at the smallest cost of time and effort, with the least possible sunk costs.”

Many are moving towards agile to better deal with uncertainty and predictability, but there are two camps of Agilists arguing over the relevance of project forecasting software in project management. While the representatives of the first camp believe that tools are ineffective and hinder Agile, the second camp of representatives, as Perry Watkins consider predictive models to be an asset:

I would disagree with the notion that attempting to predict future outcomes is not agile. Being agile has to be relative to something. You are agile today because of some perceived threat to some future state. If you have not defined what you think that future state should be, why would you need to act agilely? – Perry Watkins, the President of The TAPFT Company

The truth is that equipped with a predictive analytics tool, agile project managers have more power. They are able to experiment with different variables and see how changing one variable can influence the outcome.

The days of solidly intuitive predictions are long GONE.

What are the best examples of forecasting and predictive analytics in project management?

There are analytical project management tools designed to show your progress on each step of the way – be it in the past, in the present, or in the future. They provide project managers with vital metrics and information to keep them posted on the project’s progress. But true predictive analytics tools should do more than that. They are able to forecast what could be the future outcome of the project under various scenarios based on the data you have. According to Robert Wells, the CEO of Allocable who has nearly 20 years of experience in Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Automation, “This is done by using machines to process large volumes of performance and contextual data and predict outcomes that were previously impossible to foresee.”

Creating the list of these applications for project managers, I basically took into account two important things – available predictive modeling features and seamless integration with other tools, where you keep your data. These two things are critical to successful traveling in time. Apart from these preferences, I made sure that the tools can offer an exceptional user experience and help project managers at every stage of project management.

1. Runn – https://www.runn.io
2. Forecast – http://forecast.app
3. Celoxis – https://www.celoxis.com
4. Epicflow – https://www.epicflow.com
5. Hive – https://hive.com
6. ScopeMaster – https://www.scopemaster.com
7. Lili.ai – http://www.lili.ai
8. Certus 3 – https://certus3.com
9. nTask – https://www.ntaskmanager.com

1. Runn – https://www.runn.io

At its core, Runn is a resource management platform, and that’s what makes it so ideal for project forecasting in professional services businesses, where everything relies on people’s time and skills. Despite being fairly new on the market, the platform has become a favorite of IT consultancies, digital agencies, and software companies, and for good reason. 

Runn offers you the big picture of all your project plans, consisting of resource allocations (for actual work), placeholders (for work that’s in demand), and tentative bookings (for projects that haven’t materialized yet but were put in as opportunities by the sales team).

Project managers and operations leads appreciate Runn for the slickest and most intuitive interface, but what makes it stand out among the other solutions is the most dynamic financial reporting. Runn forecasts the revenue, cost, and profit of the project and with its robust capacity, workload, and availability charts, you can predict when you need to hire new people and spot the demand for different roles. 

In contrast to other project forecasting tools below, you won’t need to drill down to the details and estimate each single task. Just allocate your resources to projects and the system will put everything together and calculate whether your plan is feasible or not by taking into account resource availability and capacity and highlighting insights for you. 

2. Forecast – http://forecast.app

What makes Forecast stand out as a project management tool is that it learns from your project history and creates a regression model to provide future estimates of budget and task duration. It’s the first tool on the market that uses machine learning to automate project planning and thus provides you with valuable insights.

The beauty of Forecast is in algorithms that can learn and adjust for the future, but its main plus is uniting many project segments like planning, budgeting, time tracking, resource scheduling etc. in one platform. Additionally, Forecast has a myriad of integration capabilities that ease the transition and make connection simpler. For those tempted to try it out, the service includes a free 14-day trial without a credit card required. When it comes to AI and predictive analytics in project management, Forecast is second to none.

3. Epicflow – https://www.epicflow.com

Epicflow is an all-in-one tool for project and portfolio management powered by predictive analytics. Collecting all your data under one Epicflow roof, you can figure out the most efficient way to perform well within set budgets and deadlines. Based on the project schedules, resource calendars, and resource load, Epicflow can run multiple what-if simulations in parallel that show you the progress of your projects in the future and help figure out what’s optimal for you in terms of costs, time, and value. What-if scenarios allow project managers to check the impact analysis on the demand plan. Thus it’s possible to define common areas of potential risk and incorporate appropriate checks and balances into the project plan to mitigate those risks.

The software proved itself exceptionally effective for companies from different industries, like manufacturing, construction, shipbuilding, automotive, tech, and healthcare. A free trial is available after the live demonstration.

4. Celoxis – https://www.celoxis.com

Celoxis is a complete powerhouse of algorithms that promise to get you and your projects covered from risk and uncertainty. The tool has been the platform of choice for brands like HBO, Bombardier, KPMG, Tesla, Adobe, and others. It excels at matching demand with capacity. Celoxis also provides powerful data-driven predictive analytics around slippages, costs, and revenues, so that you don’t have to depend on guesswork and rather act on your findings.

5. Hive – https://hive.com

Hive is the productivity platform for project managers. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Hive Analytics provides interactive and customizable dashboards to gain actionable insights on team productivity and proactively spot risks. It forecasts how long it will take to finish projects based on how long it has taken your team in the past. Hive uses algorithms to track and predict the estimates.

6. ScopeMaster – https://www.scopemaster.com

ScopeMaster tends to be a real game-changer for large software projects. The software is a go-to for project managers to reduce rework and scope churn. It can be used as a standalone SaaS or Jira plugin. Both provide some rule of thumb forecasts for effort, cost, time, defects based on regression analysis of thousands of previous projects. But the instrumental part of ScopeMaster is the dedication to the analysis of user stories. The company examined over 10,000 user stories from different sources to build up some insight into what represents a good user story. According to the experts behind ScopeMaster, problems with requirements in large software projects tend to be the most costly if they are undetected until later stages of the project. The tool objective is to reduce risks, improve estimation, negotiation, and project control by making requirements and user stories clearer.

7. Lili.ai – http://www.lili.ai

Lili.ai is a recent new-comer in advanced project management that immediately became popular in professional circles due to its powerful AI algorithms. What its CEO Milie Taing intends to prove by means of Lili.ai is that real-time, optimized, self-learning project management is possible. The tool automates recurring tasks, strives to identify risks, and suggests measures to minimize them. It also helps to prioritize to-do lists to reduce wait time. Lili is designed especially for large multi-million dollar projects subject to heavy legal contractual penalties.

8. Certus 3 – https://certus3.com

Certus 3 is the first cognitive example of forecasting in management. The machine learning technology inside the tool analyzes how people are performing together as a team and optimizes the best route for them, counting the probability of project success in. To do this, Certus 3 considers six peak performance attributes – clarity of purpose, balance, alliance, drive, certainty, and effectiveness – and suggests areas for improvements. It is a good addition to such project management methodologies as Agile, DevOps, and Prince2.

9. nTask – https://www.ntaskmanager.com/

nTask is a versatile project management software available freely in the market. It comes packed with intelligent features providing a smart over-all coverage to many project needs. Through native modules, nTask mitigates the need to constantly switch applications for effective project management. The tool also ensures an intuitive and smooth experience on the application via a smartly developed user interface.

Whether you’re a freelancer, part of a small team, member of a big corporation, or simply a blogger with lots of tasks at hand, the tool caters a diverse range of professionals. nTask helps you manage several teams, workspaces, projects, tasks, issues and has risk management modules.

What’s next for predictive analytics in project management?

Even though there are many efficient tools, the experts committed to driving change in the project management space don’t stop, looking for better ways to improve project performance. A new market report reveals that the global online project management software market is expected to reach a value of 6.68 billion dollars by 2026. GlobeNewswire suggests these numbers are due to the increasing adoption of cloud-based project management solutions. According to the report, the market is projected to expand at a CAGR of 9.4% during the forecast period from 2018 to 2026. I’ve collected insights from experts who develop tools expecting them to change project managers’ experience.

2nd Brain

Perry Watkins, the President of The TAPFT Company is in the middle of developing the project management tool powered by predictive analytics. It’s called 2nd Brain. He created it precisely because of the inflexibility of existing tools. “People invest enormous amounts of energy in creating project plans but from there on, they basically become static, adjusting only to completion or slippage of tasks,” remarks Watkins.

2nd Brain shouldn’t work that way. It would propose a new roadmap if, for instance, one of your best customers calls and says they need the product they have been delaying for 3 months but they still want you to stick to the estimated delivery date you committed to 3 months ago. It would also make adjustments when you find out that your lead programmer just broke his leg in 3 places and will be out for 6 weeks.

2nd Brain works like GPS software. You tell it where you want to go and, based on your current location, it tells you the best route for getting there and approximately when you are supposed to arrive. If that ETA is acceptable, great. You just follow the plan provided. If not, adjust accordingly. You might speed up. You might remove stops you had planned to make along the way. The options are limitless. The point is that you adjust the data until the ETA is within an acceptable range. – Perry Watkins

Project Outcome Prediction Software

Paul Boudreau, the President of Stonemeadow Consulting, Canada is currently involved in research about how AI technology can provide value to the project management methodology used by organizations. Boudreau is now developing the logic for a predictive analytics tool that will forecast project success before the project starts and in real time as the project progresses. Currently, his team of four people is building the model which will then be coded in Python programming language so they can run the data through a classifier such as a neural network. The project is being done as part of work at the college where Boudreau teaches.

“The most difficult part at this time is getting sample data. Companies are reluctant to provide historical data where their projects have failed” admits the expert. Boudreau is working more towards AI tools that predict success and can simulate the entire project based on key success factors. The downfall of predictive analytics, in his opinion, is that it is based on historical data so he plans to include the current environment and future factors as well.

To sum up, there are particularly effective tools to do project forecasts and refine your data and I can tell that these will certainly pave our way to better project management decisions in the future. I also hope you’ll find a project forecasting tool that applies to your context and method. Leave your comments below and don’t forget to subscribe to the next flow of project management inspiration.

Illustration: Copyright © Margarita Winkler

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Since I became the President of IPMA Young Crew Portugal in January 2018, it has been a never-ending learning process. And so has my entire professional experience and my personal life.

IPMA Young Crew Portugal is a non-profit organization affiliated with APOGEP with around 25 active members – students and young professionals sharing a passion for project management, all voluntary and coming from completely different backgrounds. One may think the context is too distinct from a normal company, so why bother reading further?

People Are the Drivers, Not Processes

At some point, last year things were getting hard to lead forward. Teams were not motivated enough, they were struggling with a sense of injustice and showing low levels of engagement throughout the entire structure. We knew we had to do something about it, so we shifted our attention entirely to people. It’s not that people weren’t already important, they were just one of our many other focus points. To address this, we first decided to talk to everyone and understand their expectations. These conversations not only helped us show our appreciation for their work so far, but also provided us with tons of information to reflect on.

We then looked inside our organization and started to change our strategy in order to fit in what we’ve learned there with what we wanted to do. We want to create a culture where one can find their own special place so that together everything would be possible. All organizations, and not only voluntary-based ones like ours, should care for people. We know people are the drivers to deliver a project, not processes. Right?

Sustainability Builds on Trust and Empathy

This topic has been discussed all over the place, so it may sound like common ground to you, but you’ll be amazed at how many take for granted their most valuable asset – people. There are a lot of leaders that focus so much on brand and business that usually go like: Why are people sad and underperforming if we have such a great brand and a good business? But do you? Probably yes, but only temporarily. You will always need people to make things happen and that holds true for brands and businesses. Sustainability builds on trust, trust builds on relationships, and relationships build on empathy. Although this may look easy and somehow intuitive, don’t fool yourselves. People are complex.

Sustainability builds on trust, trust builds on relationships, and relationships build on empathy. Although this may look easy and somehow intuitive, don’t fool yourselves. People are complex.

I will never forget a quote from a speaker at one of our conferences saying “people are a lot of things.” If you think carefully this has so much of simplicity than it has of truth. And the sooner you truly impersonate this mindset, the sooner you’ll get to know the ones around you, and the quicker you’ll help them achieve their goals. If you give people a purpose and you mix it with your organization’s mission, you’re closing in on a success formula.

You Can’t Make Everyone Happy

Moreover, I was being haunted by loneliness… a lot. Running a business, a department, or a team can give you that. Every single decision just looks like you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders because you want to choose what’s best for everybody. And then you realize it’s impossible. You will most likely feel miserable and procrastinate on those difficult moments, even if sometimes you know you’re delaying the inevitable. So as a President, or a leader, you have to understand that you can’t make everyone happy.

People rely on you to decide which path to follow with a reason – you’re expected to be in the best position to gather the most valuable information that will support your decisions, and not them. And as long as you trust your vision, you clearly communicate it and motivate your team to pursue it, you’ll probably be fine. Apply coherence between what you say and what you do to develop trust and really invest in that. Sometimes a lot of people will be angry, but that’s normally when you signal a red flag on how wrong you should be. Then you go back to your thoughts and try to figure out what might need adjustments.

Project Managers Need Allies to Delegate Decisions

Decisions are a daily basis for leaders or project managers themselves. We are increasingly dealing with ever-changing contexts or scopes, unexpected budget cuts, new market demands, and people depending on us. We are being flooded with data and asked to act quickly choosing from infinite options. So unless we can upgrade our brain’s processor or add more RAM, as well as multiply ourselves to be in several places at the same time, the outcome could be a disaster.

I’ve faced a bunch of projects that were supposed to last weeks but turned into months instead, even years. Imagine you take more than 9 months to pick the right furniture for your son’s bedroom and by the time he is born he has nowhere to sleep. A bit extreme and ludicrous, I would admit, but we are already there in some of our projects. Despite this overwhelming reality I believe we can find ways to cope and I found mine through agility – the concept that invaded the minds of 99% of project managers worldwide.

I’ve faced a bunch of projects that were supposed to last weeks but turned into months instead, even years. Imagine you take more than 9 months to pick the right furniture for your son’s bedroom and by the time he is born he has nowhere to sleep.

I recently realized that if I wanted to respond faster and better I would need allies. If you can delegate tasks, why not delegate decisions too? Start by identifying those who show the ability to inspire others and also breathe the culture. Understand what motivates them and how they prefer to work. Adjust your speech and way of doing things. Empower them to make decisions without consulting you, show trust, and learn to stay away from every single detail. Ask for reports to follow progress. Finally, watch as the machine works and enjoy the time to target what requires the most of you. Naturally, this won’t happen overnight so I suggest you begin working on it. Don’t try to change from 8 to 80. Introduce slight changes gradually and adjust them to your context. Remember there’s no one-size-fits-all on this, stay agile.

Reflective Practice Works

I started applying reflective practice to learn through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self. I landed on this by chance, but now it’s so vital to me that I can’t picture myself living without any other lens than this. I’m confident this way of thinking has been working well as it allows me to extract wisdom from each and every step of the way. No mistake should go unnoticed and every positive experience must make room for better things.

Do you bear a resemblance to my experience? Please comment below or write to me, I would love to hear your stories!

Illustration: Copyright © Oksana Drachkovska

The post What I’ve Learned Being the President of IPMA Young Crew Portugal appeared first on PM Column.

Elizabeth Lyle: How to break bad management habits before they reach the next generation of leaders

1.5M views

Have you ever thought that your bad leadership habits can pass on to the next generation of leaders? Many young leaders inherit from their supervisors and repeat the catch-22 scenario. But the worst thing is that some of their bad routines become the habits of a lifetime for organizations. After all, a business that undergoes digital transformation can’t afford similar scenarios. Luckily, we have coaches like Elizabeth Lyle. She educates senior leaders on change and sheds old-fashioned leadership patterns. Elizabeth encourages younger generations to talk about major show-stoppers upon notice. Because when they are in the saddle, the worst way they can choose is repeating bad habits of their teachers.

Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the very long term

2.2M views

This TED talk on planning would become a great addition to Elizabeth Lyle’s. Ari Wallach, the speaker, is an expert who helps great leaders be more self-conscious about shaping their futures. “So it’s important that we remember — the future, we treat it like a noun. It’s not, it’s a verb. It requires action, it requires us to push into it. It’s not this thing that washes over us. It’s something that we actually have total control over. But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don’t,” says Ari. In this TED talk, he brings to light civilizational-scale problems and explains why short-term planning, or ‘short-termism,’ as he puts it, leads to numerous disasters. Ari focuses on different kinds of thinking that encourage long path philosophy, such as transgenerational thinking, futures thinking, and telos thinking. What distinguishes these three types of thinking from short-term contemplation is a focus on our actions as triggers to the next generations.

Liv Boeree: 3 lessons on decision-making from a poker champion

2.2M views

Ask yourself who you weren’t, occupying a project management position. Project managers are jugglers, builders, prophets, watchers, officers, poker players (scrum), and while they try on many other roles, they’re decision-makers, first place. This is the shortest speech among the other TED talks for project managers in this list, but it’ll give you three essential and straightforward lessons. Liv Boeree, a poker winner of the European Poker Tour, shares her twist on decision-making based on her own experience. She’ll walk you through her understanding of the lucky factor, communication, and intuition. The main lesson from her speech leaders have to remember is this one: “When we speak in numbers, we know what lands in the other person’s brain.”

Chieh Huang: Confessions of a recovering micromanager

1M views

Micromanagement is a hard lesson to learn for every leader. Chieh Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Boxed.com who once went off the rails to micromanage workers telling them how to write notes to customers. Let’s forgive him because based on this journey, he gave us one of the most creative definitions to micromanagement and delivered his most precious lessons.

Micromanagement is taking great, wonderful, imaginative people, bringing them into an organization, and then crushing their souls by telling them what font size to use. — Chieh Huang

This is the funniest TED talk for project managers I’ve personally seen in years. Who else compares his mother-in-law to a micromanager because both are constantly watching over somebody’s shoulder? But to be serious, in his speech, Chieh dwells upon the downsides and upsides of not micromanaging. His story simply deserves to be heard for the sake of the final lesson he utters at the end of the talk.

Julia Dhar: How to disagree productively and find common ground

1.7M views

It happens that a project manager comes to work and finds a new idea on the table. A debate is coming. One of your team members has just suggested something that, in their opinion, will blow away the market. How do you open your mind to it and how do you come completely tolerant, but objective to an idea? How do you disagree productively to a bad idea to filter it out? Julia Dhar has been arguing since her childhood to figure out the technical skills needed to win a debate, and she has learned some valuable lessons to share when idea management is concerned. Attacking a person making the argument is the last thing you should ever consider, admits Julia, and proves that finding common ground is imperative firsthand.

Vinay Shandal: How conscious investors can turn up the heat and make companies change

1.1M views

This is a must-watch TED talk for project managers who work with senior investment professionals. Vinay Shandal reflects on how they can catalyze large-scale change in organizations by solving different environmental, social, and governmental issues that line up with their values and purposes. If you work with a conscious investor and have an idea of making your portfolio greener, then you can use your voices together to improve the environment and the society, says Vinay.

Margaret Heffernan: Forget the pecking order at work

2.9M views

Margaret Heffernan is a management thinker, a brilliant TED speaker, and the former CEO of five businesses. She delivers an exceptionally important message to project management experts, giving advice on how to build a dream team with the potential to show spectacular results. Margaret’s story starts with research conducted on two different types of chickens — ordinary generation of chickens and the superflock. From there, the speaker jumps to her own experience of working with different companies and makes a statement that we have a wrong understanding of how to achieve success at a company level and how teams should be built. Margaret is convinced that success is not achieved by picking superstars and giving them all resources and power. In fact, such actions lead to aggression, dysfunction, and waste of the team members’ energy. What matters and outperforms individual intelligence is social connectedness, a high degree of sensitivity and empathy to each other. Margaret proceeds with her speech, identifying how to increase the level of social connectedness, as it won’t happen naturally between your team members.

Melinda Epler: 3 ways to be a better ally in the workplace

1.5M views

Melinda Epler was the Head of Marketing and Culture at an international engineering firm in 2013. Her experience there proved to be rather negative. The company culture taught her some fundamental lessons about cooperation and management that she now brings to the masses. According to Melinda, “While there were bigger issues, most of what happened were little behaviors and patterns that slowly chipped away my ability to do my work well. They ate away my confidence, my leadership, my capacity to innovate.” Melinda raises the issues that are probably familiar to everyone. Her point is that in organizations, there are people who are underprivileged because of many factors, like gender, race, nationality, geography, skin color, etc. So this TED talk is for people who would like to rebuild their confidence. If you’re a project management leader, it will also help you figure out a strategy to lead successful meetings with your team and make sure you are heard every time.

Frances Frei: How to build (and rebuild trust)

2.8M views

Frances Frei is a Harvard Business School professor who once committed all her efforts to rebuild trust to Uber when it was on fire. Frances believes that with trust people would reach unprecedented human progress. She sheds light on the component parts of trust and reveals how each of them — authenticity, logic, and empathy — can get shaky. But the main value of this TED talk for project managers is gaining knowledge of how to restore and nurture trust both on organizational and team level.

Illustration: Copyright © Irena Voilenko

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