Successful Project Control Requires Integrating All Data Sources to Uncover Decisive Metrics

By Lee S. Gliddon III, Executive Vice President at Knowledge Relay

Insufficient Project Controls destroy budgets and create schedule delays.

We all know that Project Controls without decisive metrics can lead to poor decision-making, missed deadlines, and budget overruns. Ineffectual metrics pulled from project data can be misleading, inaccurate, or irrelevant to the project’s goals making it extremely difficult for project managers to accurately track progress, identify potential problems, and take corrective action.

But not all metrics are created equal, as some project metrics are always more important for Portfolio Management than others. Further, metrics must be accurate and timely, and data must be up to date so that managers can make informed decisions in the moment and address emerging issues before problems become serious.

Despite this critical need, it is impossible for Project Controls to uncover every decisive metric without integrating all data sources for the project.

Incomplete data sources cannot escape producing an incomplete picture of project performance, and prevent Project Controls’ teams from achieving the holistic view necessary to:

• Identify trends that may not be clear from incomplete data sources
• Identify risks and take early steps to mitigate them
• Generate accurate forecasts on progress, budget, and resource needs
• Continuously improve their decision-making

As such, integrating all data sources is essential for effective project control to surface decisive metrics and improve project success. However, there are huge challenges to integrating all data sources for a project—foremost that data is typically stored in different formats and systems, making it difficult to extract and integrate every data point.

At Knowledge Relay, we believe the benefits of integrating all data sources outweigh the costs of such difficulty—especially when site performance and careers are at stake.

For example, one of our clients is the Hanford Mission Integration Solutions (HMIS) team, comprised of partners trusted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to ensure safety and site integration at the Hanford site in Washington. Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the Hanford site produced plutonium for national defense and the site is managed by two DOE offices where project control requires an integrated schedule for all of their prime contractors.

Despite this critical requirement, no internal IT team, no Ph.D. in Data Science, and no prime contractor to date has been able to successfully integrate all the data sources necessary to generate an integrated schedule.

But Knowledge Relay did!

Knowledge Relay integrated all five prime contractors for the first time—allowing for integrated schedules. Soon we will have their budgets integrated as well.

We are proud to deliver industry-leading BI, IT, data integration, and data visualization solutions to HMIS, and finally resolve their challenge of integrating all data sources across prime contractors.

Learn how we did it by connecting with me on LinkedIn or at KnowledgeRelay.com.