Using business intelligence to support multi-project management

Abstract

Business intelligence has gained significant popularity in the last few years, and not least because of the fact that businesses are managing vast amounts of data in their daily operations. The subject area of business intelligence has not gained the same ground in academy as it has in practice, and our knowledge is lacking especially in the relationship of business intelligence and its organisational context. Business intelligence can integrate data, automate its processing and present it better, thus having something to give for various business environments. In this master’s thesis, the potential of business intelligence is explored in the context of a multi-project environment. The study is a qualitative single-case study on one division of a large Finnish industrial machinery manufacturer. The division is facing issues in managing the complex multi-project environment consisting of various types of projects. The environment is in need of ways to integrate its scattered project management information to enable better coordination. Business intelligence has been chosen as the way to explore solving these issues. Thus, the goals of this study were to understand the state of the organisation, identify its needs and issues further, and explore how those needs could be fulfilled with business intelligence tools. The empirical data was collected via semi-structured interviews and a research diary recording meetings relevant to the subject. The most prevalent issues regarding multi-project management in the organisation were lacking in tools for both project portfolio management and resource management, lacking in information availability across both organisational units and projects, having too many tools for project management and no integration between them, and the poor quality of project management data. These issues were used as the primary drivers for the actual results of this thesis. The three types of reports defined in this thesis were portfolio and project reports, resource utilisation reports and resource demand reports. In addition, the suggestions for further future included better integration of data between various organisational IT systems, mainly to better address the organisational dependencies faced in multi-project management. Business intelligence would also have the potential to renew management of the organisation in various other ways, but a first step was taken with these results. Thus, deeper research is still needed to explore the potential of business intelligence in multi-project management, and other contexts.