What if I told you that a Gantt Chart was a form of Business Intelligence (BI)?  Wait, hear me out.

Wikipedia tells me that BI is “the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes.”  Yep, sounds like a Gantt Chart to me.

It has always been important for company leadership to be able to read, absorb, and react to as much relevant information as possible in an efficient way.  Technology is giving us new, easy-to-use tools to see our data better, absorb the information we need, and make the decisions necessary to achieve success.

But the realm of projects strangely seems to be thought of as something that technology can’t make better.  Sort of like a hammer.  Everyone has one.  It works.  But if you ask a carpenter to use one instead of a nail-gun on a large project, he’d probably chuckle.

But technology is reaching into project and program realm more quickly than ever.  A wealth of new tools is popping up to begin to solve problems like ease of collaboration, portfolio analysis, and reporting (OnePager).

As much as I hate myself for it, I’m ALWAYS interested in reading about what the new smartphone does.  I don’t always bite, but sometimes I come across a feature that I just have to have because it makes my life easier…better.

If your team isn’t already looking into new technology and tools that can help your company manage and communicate its portfolio and projects more effectively, it’s probably time to start.  The technology has changed significantly over the last 5-10 years and we’ve only gotten started.

Wait until we have predictive intelligence!!!