Scorecard source data needs standards
There's a huge movement towards Business Intelligence and data mining - but to do that with Project Management data, you've got to have good data to start with.

For those of us entrenched in the project management industry, the recent Project Management Institute conference in Toronto was a must-attend. This is PMI's annual international (well, North American) show and this year it was held in Canada making for a great opportunity for many local project managers to attend who otherwise might not be able. During the show I was privileged to attend a Microsoft Project Association event put on by the local chapter of the MPA (www.mpa-gta.org) and the Global Organization (www.mympa.org). Microsoft was there and one of the Microsoft Project product managers from Redmond gave a fascinating presentation of a soon-to-be-released product called Business Scorecard Manager.

The product is in its final stages of beta testing under the code name Maestro (which frankly sounds sexier to me but then, who am I to judge?) and provides a central point to create formulas and displays for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are then made into a variety of context-sensitive scorecards or visible displays. The demonstration showed data from a variety of sources including financial, sales and even geographic were woven into a single display.

The cream topping of this demo was perfectly positioned as we saw project data from Microsoft Project Server woven into the Business Scorecard display. The whole structure sits within Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server technology which, if you haven't seen, is probably worth a look.

Now, Microsoft gets plenty of plugs and certainly doesn't need mine but this display was impressive. I've been doing a bit of looking at scorecard systems since I wrote about it in this column over a year ago. This new product by Microsoft is certainly not the first scorecard product on the market. It's been preceded by many others but I found it interesting that the movement has picked up enough momentum that Microsoft felt compelled to enter the industry with its own offering.

After Microsoft's presentation, I was approached by several attendees who discussed the relevance of using Scorecarding with Enterprise Project Management and of course, I reiterated my enthusiasm from a couple of years ago. One comment in particular however, brought me up short.

If the underlying data has questionable quality, said one of my colleagues, wouldn't that make the entire system suspect?

It has gotten me to thinking and, the more I think about it, the more it disturbs me. The answer is yes of course, but I realize that in the systems we design and deploy that there are huge assumptions in the enterprise project systems that get deployed.

We depend in great part on the natural human filtering that goes on when data is examined and entered. In systems which have an extensive legacy culture such as core financial systems, we accept the basis of how data is entered because it is common to all organizations.

It is when we apply the same notion to other enterprise systems that we often see how challenging it is to establish stability in this type of data. CRM, Enterprise Project Management, HR type systems turn out to all require a remarkable amount of effort to make their data as trustworthy as core financials.

It's not the technology, of course, it's the standard for using that technology which must be adapted with sufficient uniformity to make sense. In my own firm, we're currently struggling with CRM terms for what makes a lead vs. a contact, vs. an opportunity… well, you get the idea.

When we create an executive display system to roll all that data up to easy-to-read one page displays on which core business decisions are made, we've got to take pause.

I'm sure executive dashboards of scorecard type information will be hot sellers but before we deliver a system that eliminates the need for human filtering of data, we've got to make sure that the underlying source data for those displays delivers what we need. Not doing our homework with this kind of system could pay back dividends that won't be too welcome.

For more information on this article or any aspect of project management software or systems contact the author, Chris Vandersluis or HMS Software at info@hmssoftware.ca or by phone at 514-695-8122.