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The BALD approach

The future of Project Management

Mohammed Ajmal (5433794)

Arshiya Anis Shah (4408780)

Arunav Gandotra (5322935)

Ralph Joel Roche (5380248)


Table of Contents

1. ABSTRACT ..................................................................... 3ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.


2. LITERATURE REVIEW ..................................................... 4ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.
2.1 BIG DATA CASE STUDY ............................................................... 4ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.
2.2 WHY BIG DATA? TOWARDS A PROJECT ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK ARTICLE5ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.
2.3 DOES LEAN & AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT HELP COPING WITH PROJECT
COMPLEXITY? ................................................................................. 6ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.

3. CRITIQUE ...................................................................... 8ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.


3.1 BIG DATA ................................................................................. 8ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.
3.2 LEAN AND AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT ................................... 10ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.

4.CONCLUSION ............................................................... 12ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.


Abstract:

This research involves predicting the future of project management based on current trends in

the market, our conclusion was made from studying two research papers. As per current trend

there is a huge wave welcoming the idea of Big data in project management, however it is not

widely implemented by organizations due to huge investment cost involved.

Organizations are adopting big data patterns to capture, manage and derive value from

massively large data sets (e.g. Hadoop and NoSQL platform) for some of their projects to get

best yields.

On the other hand, we compared traditional methods and Agile project management methods.

We realized that agile approach is gaining success due to the way it works. It is about

embracing change, even in the later stages which tells that it is having the real-time information

to tightly manage time, cost and scope. In this methodology complexity is reduced by breaking

down a, for example 12-month project, into smaller chunks called Sprints (2-4 weeks time)

Our research is about merging Lean practices and Big Data with Agile project management. Our

approach is proposed to tackle the issue of complexity and other drawbacks of traditional

project management methods such as delays in projects, budget over runs etc.
LITERATURE REVIEW

Project managers have yet to embrace wholeheartedly the advantages of big data. Big data is

getting popular in every major industry, report claim they are present in all major projects

related to military, healthcare and IT.

Here is one of the case study for big data in one project:

In Sefton Council UK, empty houses didnt

pay full council tax because usually

occupants often falsify their records with

councils and to evade tax, this resulted in

costing an abundance of tax fraud to the

council. Sefton Metropolitan Borough

Council suspected people at virtually 4,900 addresses were claiming incorrectly, but physically

house-to-house inspections would have been too costly and tedious. They came up with a

solution for it, a sizably voluminous data number-crunching exercise. They hired big data

consultancy Arvato to do the job.

The solution was to visually examine credit and other financial information, such as

indemnification history and payment activities, and use specialist software to verify this data

with the data the council already had on each of the property. They came up with the ranking
table after this analysis which provided them with a more pellucid picture to target the houses

that were the most liable to be occupied.

By utilizing immensely colossal data in this way, they could determine which properties had

illegitimately been registered as vacuous, and subsequently reduce the caliber of council tax

fraud and evasion.

In fact, Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council could relegate 434 houses out of 4,900 as highly

liable to be occupied and a further 1,313 as plausibly likely. This categorization availed them

prioritize the subsequent physical inspections, starting with those with the highest chance of

being occupied. Hence, they were able to reduce the tax fraud in a small span of time.

Almost 50% companies in US have initiated big data in the workplace and for their project but

few of them have been managed to reach the business goal due to its complexity and huge

investment.

In the first journal , Why Big Data? Towards a project assessment framework, the work revolves

around building a framework to access technological capability of an organization to invest for

big data applications/analytics in their project.

The research is providing the base for the calculation in a Big Data spectrum. The calculations

will be an absolute measure that could simplify the decision making and help the organizations

to better support the decision making.


As a basic of big data, it is based on three fundamentals which are volume, velocity and variety.

Combining these three fundamentals it is easy to access big data requirement, feasibility and

investment for organizations in their projects.

The framework provided is as depicted below:

Once the framework is built the complexity level can be calculated based on volume, velocity

and variety of the data. It is helpful to decide how several data formats can be collected and

analyzed in real time and hence help in making a better decision on investment.

With Big data project assessment framework (BigDAF), organization will be able to use their Big

Data project per dimension, volume, velocity and variety. With this framework, a management

research team will measure and understand the real challenges regarding big data investment.

In the second journal Does lean & agile project management help coping with project

complexity? the authors are discussing about 2 existing practices and how their fusion will help

deliver projects successfully. They start by explaining the most common problem Project

managers face in the construction industry, and how it could be overcome with their hypothesis

and analysis. Its a common practice in most projects of any industry to not finish on time and
run over budget. In the article, they have explained such a problem exists because of

implementation of traditional project management methods and the rising complexity of

projects. The authors mention that there are various factors that contribute to the above said

problems; they have categorized the factors to internal and external causes. External causes are

factors that are beyond project teams control for example financial turmoil, weather etc.

However, the internal causes are results of action from the client/consultant, resources

management etc. These factors along with the complexity make it hard to complete the

projects successfully. Even though the above mentioned are the reasons for the failure of

projects some researchers claim it is the poor management of projects that leads to these

failures. All above mentioned issues is paving way for requirement of a new and fresh

methodology.

Its mentioned in the article that project complexity is evolving rapidly and the predominant

and existing techniques of projects management are not capable of handling the changes and

difficulties we are going to face in future projects. Project management practices had started in

the 50s and havent evolved much. The first industry to implement project management was

Aerospace and defense industries, these industries were flexible and not complex. However,

these days various fields and industries are implementing project management. As the

complexity increased it became hard to predict our project timeline, outcome and other project

variables. Lean approach focusses on attaining more with less. The wide spread awareness of

Lean practices and its benefits has encouraged every industry to implement it. Even though its

implementation is little slow now we believe it will pick up momentum and will be very

common practice for all Engineering projects. The report claims there are indication confirming
the successful application of Lean approach to project management in complex and difficult

areas; this verifies our ideology of using this for future complex projects.

The second approach mentioned in the article is the agile project management approach.

Agile approach can be defined as a practice to increase the relevance, quality, flexibility, and

business value of project solutions. Presently it is widely used in the software industry, but we

believe the ideology can also be implemented in other fields. This approach has overcome the

setback of traditional project management techniques such as budget over runs, missing

deadlines, low quality output etc. Even though there are various agile practices most of them

share some similar objectives such as: incremental planning that uses the most recent and

readily available information, building in quality upfront, addressing technical risks as early as

possible, delivering frequent and continuous business value to the organization, entrust and

empower staff, encouraging ongoing communication between the business areas and project

team members, and increase in the clients involvement. The above-mentioned points make

this method widely applicable and explain why it could be used to use in complex Engineering

projects. The article had used Scrum method in their analysis.

In the next part of the section the critique for the literature will be mentioned.
Critique:

In the upcoming years, a unified and structured platform architecture for Big Data projects will

be one of the strategies to implement.

Defining a logical architecture of the layers and components of a big data solution is important

since the characteristics of each data type is different (unstructured data- Eg. social media

videos images etc.)

Once the data type, content format, data source and data consumers are well defined the

analytics platform/architecture needs to be decided.

The right architecture doesnt depend primarily on technical details of functionality checklists

but on the business problem it is trying to solve.


The business case depicted below is based on a white paper for big data architecture need.

The above table shows various industries business case differs from each other regarding big

data analytics need.

The second literature, Does lean & agile project management help coping with project

Complexity had conducted a questionnaire and shown the co-relation amongst the practices

and complexity. The first table plotted the fusion of these practices against different types of

complexity; detailed scenario analysis was made to understand the figures from the survey.

Various factors as to why such an outcome was concluded and it pointed to various problems

we face in our traditional project management execution.


One of the drawbacks we believe of this questionnaire was the geographical limitation; the

survey was limited to specific industry and was conducted among Dutch citizens only

For table 2 they had plotted each practice and merged approach against complexity but

this time they analyzed how it reduced or simplified the complexity. From this analysis one

thing was very clear both practices had its merits in different ways and some of these merits

went hand in hand. Such an observation made us come with the hypothesis that this

combination is the future of Project management. Even though this approach covers
various sectors of the management there were certain gaps they didnt close; amongst that

was the gap of experienced professionals required to finish the tasks, this observation made

us conclude 2 things one being the quality of projects will be higher than normal and the

second was the cost of hiring specific experienced and qualified project managers would be

burdensome on many companies. There is also the fact that these practices have not being

implemented in other industries. Some industries are afraid of implementing such practices

as they are afraid of the cost involved, what they fail to realize is the return they get from

successfully completing the project while keeping the customer satisfied. The customer

satisfaction is guaranteed as they are actively involved in the project in various parts. In our

current economy, these requirements will make harder for everyone. Those observations

made us come to our conclusion of choosing big data along with the lean and agile project

management practice.

Conclusion:

When we look at the bigger picture a combined implementation of these practices can help

in resolving problems we face while applying traditional project management methods. The

reason why we wanted to combine the methods is because all the techniques have their unique

strengths and weaknesses a combined initiative would cover their gaps and ensure successful

completion of projects. The reason why we believe such an existing technique not being

implanted in wide scale is because of the cost of using technology to implement the technique.

With every passing day technology become cheaper and we predict such a move would help

and enforce widespread application of Lean, Big Data and Agile project management approach.
References:

1: Portela, Filepe, Luciana Lima and Manuel Filepe Santos, Why big data? Towards a project

assessment Framework. Procedia Computer Science 98 (2016) : 604-609

2: Raconteur. (2016). Big data: the next big thing in project management - raconteur.net.

[online] Available at: http://raconteur.net/business/big-data-the-next-big-thing-in-project-

management [Accessed 19 Dec. 2016].

3: Hussain, A. and Roy, A. (2016). The emerging era of Big Data Analytics. Big Data Analytics,

1(1).

4: Sohi, A., Hertogh, M., Bosch-Rekveldt, M. and Blom, R. (2016). Does Lean & Agile Project

Management Help Coping with Project Complexity?. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences,

226, pp.252-259.

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