Drowning in Information and Starving for Knowledge

Please read the quote below and let it sink in for a second before you continue reading.

The quote is by Rutherford David Rogers, Director, Yale University Libraries, from 1985.

If we were drowning in information back then, situation certainly hasn’t improved since. As a curios fact, it was estimated in 2008 that US households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008.  According to University of California, San Diego, this is about 3.6 billion trillion bytes, and total bytes consumed were the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.

Granted, most of this information consists of streaming gaming data and TV (did you know that 25% of all internet traffic in North America is Netflix?), which might even make us want to analyze how much “useless” information we consume, but I am not going there now.

As a project manager you also have a tremendous amount of information at your fingertips and it can be a challenge for a project manager to make sense of this information. We have so much information today that one monitor isn’t longer enough!

Below I outline a few simple steps you can follow that will help bringing some structure into the apparent chaos:

A crucial but often neglected element is to define which information elements are useful to you in managing your project. Many lose sight of that all information tracking comes at a cost – both directly by having to categorize and collect the information, but also indirectly by causing grievance in the team when too much information is requested. As a project manager you need to strike a balance and find out when enough is enough.Think about how often you want to have status reports, how detailed you want to go, and what information you really need. Do you really need to track every minute of the day, or can we leave that approach to the attorneys? Think hard about whether the information you are collecting will assist you in gaining insight into the project or not.

Once you have determined the information elements you need you must establish clear routines for how you will collect the information and with what frequency. Are you having weekly reports or monthly reports? Are you doing some parts of the projects with more stringent controls than others, due to higher risks? Who is responsible for collection the information? Where do you store the information afterwards so that it can be retrieved? Fortunately today’s wide selection of collaboration tools make the organization of the project information easier, but if you don’t think of the structure from the beginning you may easily be overloaded by information chaos. Remember: A fool with a tool is still a fool…

There can be hidden treasures among your data. Visualizing cost and progress information into clear and easy-to-read S-curves and gantt charts is crucial. Be creative in how you use visualization tools, but remember that fancy does not necessarily mean better. Avoid using pie-charts, as in nearly all cases a bar-chart will be clearer to the reader – using a pie chart without labels is leaving too much guess work to the reader.

And last but not least – make sure your stakeholders know about your information! Ask for their feedback and make sure you continuously improve your information in terms of format, presentation and content.