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Project management tool threatens “central planners”

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In the rebellion of the business users, in which top-down gets tipped over, even stodgy old project management is coming alive.

“Most of the decisions made in project management,” says Liquid Planner CEO Charles Seybold, “happen under the surface.” He’s now trying to win over the people who work on projects but haven’t run many of them. He’s using transparency and collaboration.

Liquid Planner, the cloud-based insurgent — “a Wikipedia for projects” — has its roots in Seybold’s experience organizing Expedia’s first project management office. Every time the 40 or so projects under his watch got rolled up, he says, there was “a new distortion of reality.”… Read the rest “Project management tool threatens “central planners””

New data analysts and teenage love

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Search all the business literature you can and you’ll never find data analysis compared to romantic love. But, hey, why not? Love’s trajectories might hint at what the business world’s newly enabled generation of data analysts can expect.

These data analysts tend to be independent, are often creative and at least partly self-trained. They’re strapped to rockets from Tableau, Lyzasoft, Predixion, and others, tools that are at first deceptively toy-like. Aren’t they analogous to the garden variety teenager? Bothg groups revel in newly discovered tools, while both pursuits are fundamentally social — as Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis observes about data analysis.… Read the rest “New data analysts and teenage love”

How to analyze unfamiliar data: circle, dive, and riff

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When you come face to face with unfamiliar data, how do you proceed? How do you avoid sending yourself and your shiny “speed of thought” tool slamming into a dead end? Dan Murray’s got a routine — and he’s also got certain music and right-brained books to go along.

Dan’s first rule: “Don’t pre-think.” It’s the hardest thing for people to learn, he says. “If you go into [data analysis] thinking you know where you’re going, you easily miss the granule of gold.”

He’s the chief operating officer and heavy-hitting data analyst at InterWorks, Inc., an Oklahoma-based business consultancy. What seems to me like an unending stream of mid-size businesses from all different industries has kept him running days, nights, and weekends to make sense of each one’s data and unravel old data knots.… Read the rest “How to analyze unfamiliar data: circle, dive, and riff”