If you don’t count brand building exercises or overly-ceremonial extravaganzas, today is baseball’s opening day. Baseball, like your average project, produces a lot of data. Some of it important, some of it not. Sometimes little parts of that data matter tremendously to only a very few people. But baseball has mastered, over the last century, a way of displaying that information clearly, concisely and (amazingly) practically all-inclusively. I am speaking, of course, of that most humble of sports page filler, the box score.
The box score, which has evolved in fits and starts ever since the earliest days of baseball, it now an outstanding post-mortem of the previous days’ games. Or, as the geniuses at Baseball Prospectus put it:
Box scores now tell us nearly everything that occurs in a game. They tell us hot warm it was, the direction and speed of the wind, and how many people came out to the park. We can find out who the umpiring crew was. Baserunning blunders, substitution patterns, clutch hits, high-leverage relief appearances–it’s all in a good box score, along with groundballs, flyballs, balls, strikes, and pitch counts.
Project Management could use just such a miraculous little box of ink. A simple, yet detailed explanation of everything that happened in a project. With that sort of detail at hand, you could review your past projects and plan for the future - the way baseball teams know to pitch certain batters outside on a 3-2 count.
Journyx Timesheet might not squeeze the data into a perfect, 8 pt font column on page 3 of the sport section, but it can give you the data you need to know how to pitch that next hitter, or, rather, how to bid that next project.
And don’t think we’re not looking for ways to simplify that information further. We’ll get there, too. Just as sure as the amazing 100+ years of raw baseball data at Retrosheet.org can be analyzed better thanks to the efforts of the crew at Baseball-Reference.com.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a game on.
-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content