Traditionally, projects are document centric. This applies to exchanges between parties or expected deliverables as well as to measurement of project management and engineering team progress. However, there would now be great benefits to move instead to a data-centric approach, where documents are only specific views of the underlying data. This approach would allow to fully benefit from the enriched information available, while assuring better consistency across the project. Our new White Paper 2021-02 ‘How Projects Should Move from Being Document-Centric to Data-Centric’ explores the potential benefits and the challenges for projects to move towards a data-centric approach.
Traditional project management revolves around documents. Document registers are setup that list all project deliverables; progress is measured based on document stages, while documents are being transmitted between parties and reviewed and commented. In traditional approaches documents are really the elementary piece of work that is managed throughout the project.
Modern projects produce vast amounts of data, some of which do find their way in a summarised manner in documents. There is a substantial loss of usefulness of data that is transferred in a document: loss of detail, loss of recoverability for other usage, transformations that may not be reversible; etc. The underlying datasets include a much richer information. A simple example is when 3D engineering models are transferred to drawings. The transfer is not reversible as it would be quite cumbersome, and probably incomplete, to generate the 3D model from the collection of drawings it has generated. Limiting oneself to the drawings implies a significant loss of data. In a wider view, it is very difficult to extract useful information from document control databases even if they have been properly setup and tagged.
There are still a few issues that prevent moving immediately towards a data-centric approach.
- Moving towards a data-centric approach requires a preliminary agreement on the data standards for exchange and data utilisation between all the parties involved in a project.
- The data structure and content must clearly respond to a specific purpose which also has to be defined in advance. For example, what is the aim at producing a “digital twin”?
- In data-driven systems, it is much more difficult to freeze the data, because the whole approach is to constantly upgrade the data model collaboratively based on new knowledge. It will therefore be difficult to freeze the data during a review period
- There are substantial benefits in writing summary documents and ensuring there is adequate consistency across all the different aspects to be considered. Therefore, data-driven approaches should not supersede completely the need to produce certain key documents that require strategic thinking
In projects the trend is definitely to move towards data-centric approaches because the traditional document-centric approach now appears to be too reductionist and an impediment to easy utilisation of the underlaying project data. The shift will certainly start on the technical and engineering side with enriched 3D models. The industry needs to overcome the issue of sharing and exchanging data throughout the value chain. The rest of project management will also certainly move to the data-centric approach, generating documents from data bases that will allow increased configuration control and improved usage of the data. This shift is still in its infancy but can be expected to become mainstream in the next few years.
Read our new White Paper 2021-02 ‘How Projects Should Move from Being Document-Centric to Data-Centric’ to better understand this underlying trend in project management.
If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: https://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2021-02_data_not_documents_v0.pdf
