Question

You are a project manager for a large business intelligence project. What tools will you use to help communicate and present data to help make decisions throughout the project lifecycle?

Answer 1

Project management is the process of planning, controlling, organizing, directing and staffing in an organization or a project to achieve specific goals and meet specific objectives of the company. In this process, a lot of tasks are to be executed and various decisions are to be made at different stages. The various tools that are used to communicate and present data to help make decisions throughout the project lifecycle are as follows:

1. Flow chart – It is a graphical representation of work flow steps, in which various steps are connected to each other by ‘paths’. The direction of the path represents the direction of the work flow. The steps are denoted by shapes which can be square, rectangle, triangle, circle, etc, which should be predefined for easy understanding and reduced confusion. The advantage of flow chart is that any correction can be made easily without any redundancy.
2. Pareto diagram – It is a chart consisting of both bar graphs and line graphs which is based on the Pareto principle of 80/20, which states that 80% of the effects of the problem occur due to 20% of the factors. The pareto chart represents all the possible events that can occur in a project. Events are categorized according to their frequency of occurrence from left to right.
3. Histogram – It is a statistical tool for showing various measures of central tendency and dispersion for a given set of data. Various resources that are required to execute a project can be defined using histogram.
4. Ishikawa or fishbone diagram – It is also known as cause and effect diagram. It represents the cause of problems and the various actions that are to be done in order to reach a goal which is at the head of fishbone. The diagram is called so because of its resemblance with fishbone, which has the major problem in the centre and the branches represents the various minor issues that lead to the cause of major issue.
5. Scatter diagram – It is also known as correlation diagram, which shows the correlation between two 2 factors. When one factor is highly dependent on another factor, they have a highly positive correlation, i.e, a directly proportional relationship. For example, when no. of labor increases, productivity also increases. These 2 elements have a highly positive correlation. Whereas as a example to negative correlation, when work load increases, efficiency of employees decreases, where one factor increases when other factor decreases. When there is no relation between the factors, there is said to have a zero correlation. Eg: no of cars in the parking lot and productivity of workers.
6. Control chart – This chart is used when we want to determine whether a process is stable or not. It consist of upper specification limit as well as lower specification limits, which is calculated using the standard deviation. If the process has its mean is within the USL and LSL. Based in the control chart, decisions on whether to adopt a method or not is taken.