Five tips to improve your data literacy skills as a project manager

If there’s one skill that will benefit your career, it’s data literacy. Confidence in understanding and using data well is fast becoming the thing that will give you the edge in your projects. Where once it might have been viewed as solely a tech skill, it’s now considered a soft skill, too – and one that will reap benefits.

Below are five tips on improving your data literacy, as recently told to the APM Podcast.

1. Understand what data literacy could do for you

“Data literacy is your ability to speak confidently about data,” says Gareth Parkes, Head of Data and Analytics at Sir Robert MacAlpine. “It becomes a universal language that enables you to have all sorts of very detailed conversations, as well as being able to zoom all the way out to see the big picture. Being able to tap into that and have that kind of literacy breeds a confidence and curiosity. It helps people in all sorts of different roles to achieve their goals.

“Absolutely every project is a data project – it’s just that most of us haven’t realised that yet.”

2. The key skills you need to know about

The APM Data Literacy Skills Framework is a practical toolkit for project professionals that outlines five competencies: managing project information correctly; possessing a foundation knowledge of data and concepts; interpreting and influencing with data; data visualisation and storytelling; and decision-making with data.

Regarding the final competency, Rob Lord – Director of Major Programmes at BT International – says: “It’s quite easy for some folks to fall into the trap of being obsessed around data inputs, and the process management around that, but much more important is the ability to answer the ‘So what?’ question.

“So, what’s the output or impact that’s going to have a positive result for you or for whichever stakeholders you are serving? That’s why it’s so important to me; it really is an aid to improving predictability and assurance, especially where you’re dealing with large portfolios of work and building trust through objectivity.”

Parkes adds: “As project delivery gets ever more complex, our own experiences can only ever provide a sliver of the answer and understanding.”

Without tapping into data skills and other tools, you are limiting your ability to make good decisions.

3. Now get benchmarking

You now need to measure yourself (and your team) against the five APM competencies and benchmark yourselves, from having a general awareness of something to feeling expert in it. Work out where your blind spots are and where untapped expertise may lie.
“It may well be that you have somebody who is incredibly passionate about visualising data who hasn’t been utilised,” says Parkes. “A lot of it is a soft skill. It’s not a technical skill, and it’s not as hard as people think.”
You could try having a 10-minute conversation or a lunchtime session where somebody is invited to show what they’ve been doing or what they’ve learned.

4. Be a self-learner

“There are so many sources of information, learning and knowledge that are available through open sources that there’s no real excuse for ignorance,” says Lord. “Even if your company isn’t as supportive as it could be, folks can leverage the APM framework or LinkedIn training, or other mechanisms to build the foundation of their knowledge.”

5. Practise!

Try and put your learning into practice, says Lord: “Some of that is about forming habits in terms of how we use data management discipline to drive good outcomes. It could mean that you make a contract with yourself that you always triangulate multiple data sources so that you don’t fall foul of being biased towards one; or that you are always going to use data to inform your decisions.”

And remember that data literacy is a language, and like all new languages, the hardest part is speaking it. Until you start having conversations using data language, your fluency won’t take off. It’s OK if you stumble over your words or say the wrong thing when you are learning, but make talking data a habit and you’ll quickly find your feet.

Listen to the APM Podcast’s episode ‘Is data literacy a soft skill?’ wherever you get your podcasts

An abridged version of the APM Data Literacy Skills Framework can be found here (APM Corporate Members have access to the full version)