Gary Sutton

So they focus on the soft skills.

We need someone who is well organized.

We need someone who can communicate well.

And those are great things.

But project management also requires hard skills just like any other role requires hard skills.

But those are not understood or appreciated as well as they should be.

So what happens is you're getting really unskilled people in project management roles.

So you think about all these people, let's say you've got a cross-functional project, all of these employees, all of these other resources from both IT and business assigned to a project, and the person who might be the least skilled is the one leading the project.

So you've got companies and other organizations underestimating the need for project management.

They don't understand the full skill set that's required to manage a project effectively.

So you're not getting a very skilled person into those roles, but yet they're leading the project.

Right.

And I think that more than anything else is why so many projects go off the rails, especially the larger, more complex they get, the more off the rails they get.

And again, it's because of bad project management.

That's absolutely correct.

That's absolutely correct.

But, so yeah, I'm gonna be speaking on quantitative techniques that should be applied to project management.

And coming from the data science world, managing a project is in many ways very similar to other data science methods, right?

So when you think about all the different models that you can develop, for instance, and other quantitative techniques that data scientists sometimes employ, whether that's,

creating a Monte Carlo simulation or developing a Markov chain or fitting some kind of machine learning model right they look and sound very different but fundamentally they're very similar they're all around reducing uncertainty and project management is a is also a very project I should say are really an uncertain situation we don't know we might know the tasks that are needed but