6. Importance of Project Management in Business Analytics: Academia and Real World

Project management constitutes a powerful lever as organizations face increasing pressure to manage projects to budget, on time, and deliver more insights, in less time and with rapidly increasing amounts of data. This is critical especially in business analytics, with more than75% of organizations planning big data investments over the next several years. But the manipulation of massive amounts of data presents challenges – budgetary, time constraints, execution, proper manager skillsets, and such like. These challenges have cramped recent project rollouts, as only 37% of organizations have deployed big data projects in the past year; this suggests that filling the gap between data and insight remains a substantial hurdle as well as evolving need of project management for such projects. This chapter offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big data challenges in a rapidly evolving, data-rich environment. Simultaneously, it establishes a bridge between business and academia as they both recognize the joint necessity to develop highly trained project managers to utilize the powerful and cutting edge analytical tools available to create value.