Project Management
A key takeaway from this article is that "the purpose of operations is to keep the organization functioning while the purpose of a project is to meet its goals and conclude. Therefore, operations are ongoing while projects are unique and temporary". Why is this such an important distinction? Projects have a beginning and an end. Operations always hum along in the background while everyone else works on projects. Which category does BI fit into? What does the BI analyst do? List up to 10 activities. Which of these consists of persistent monitoring? Maybe there is an aspect the business decision-makers want to observe daily, weekly, or monthly. This could be production levels, hiring rates, training costs, or anything else. These would be considered operational activities. These are normally almost fully automated via dashboards with little input from the analyst once the program is set to run. There may be some analytic process you add before you submit the regular report, but you are not creating something unique and new. If this is all a firm uses its BI capacity for, it wastes a valuable resource that should be constantly put to work on long- and short-term projects to answer strategic-level questions.
Project Management Expertise
In order for you, as the project manager, to manage the competing project constraints and the project as a whole, there are some areas of expertise you should bring to the project team (Figure 2.11). They are knowledge of the application area and the standards and regulations in your industry, understanding of the project environment, general management knowledge and skills, and interpersonal skills. It should be noted that industry expertise is not in a certain field but the expertise to run the project. So while knowledge of the type of industry is important, you will have a project team supporting you in this endeavor. For example, if you are managing a project that is building an oil platform, you would not be expected to have a detailed understanding of the engineering since your team will have mechanical and civil engineers who will provide the appropriate expertise; however, it would definitely help if you understood this type of work.
Let's take a look at each of these areas in more detail.