Gary Sutton

That might be counterintuitive to even people who are very familiar with R and use R every day.

But because project management really should be very quantitative in nature.

I'll get to that in just a sec.

R is really a more natural application to plan and manage projects than what others might expect.

So project management might sound dull to some people.

It might sound dull even to data scientists.

But in the workplace, Sean, almost everything is done through a project, right?

And some of these projects might be very simple and straightforward.

Others can be cross-functional.

So you've got several teams and organizations in the business and in IT, and they need to contribute to this very same project.

And many of these projects are absolute cluster fucks.

And so why is that?

And from my experience and based on my observations, projects go off the rails more often than not because of bad project management.

And you can otherwise blame execution elsewhere across the project.

I don't think that's the problem.

I think project management more often than not is the problem.

Here's the thing.

companies and other organizations, they make this assumption.

Okay, someone isn't a good programmer, okay, and that same person isn't a good analyst, so therefore they must be a good project manager, which of course is completely illogical.

And then other organizations underestimate the skill set required to be an effective project manager.