New Horizons Blog and Resources

There is a saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Such a simple phrase can encompass many scenarios in life, both personally and professionally. This idiom was originally meant to convey a stubborn person who is unwilling to take advice. I admit I have sometimes been that horse.

But as a trained project manager, I must say that lately this saying has been playing in my head even more frequently because of recent changes to the Certified Associate Project Manager (CAPM) curriculum. The concepts of “Information Management” and “Knowledge Management” have been added since the 6^th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) guide. I think many people gloss over these additions as “just more things to manage” or “just more things to memorize for the certification exam.” However, to me, it speaks volumes to the most underlying issue that plagues all projects in every industry all around the world, and that is: information is essentially worthless until it is transferred into knowledge.

365 Real-Time Co-Authoring

I’m going to tell you an anecdote that I’m sure will ring true for you: you go to open a file that you desperately need to work on, but a dialog box warning pops up saying “This file is locked for editing by so-and-so, would you like to open a Read Only copy”. Naturally, you click yes because the work must be done. So you do your work and then click Save As. Now, there are 2 copies of similar files, and as time passes it becomes 3 copies, and then 4… because you and your colleagues can’t work on the same file at the same time, right?

As report writers, we often do not have the ability to change the data on the database directly; we merely have to work with the data we’ve got. For this reason, we spend much of our time trying to cosmetically “fix” the data just enough so our report can run properly.

This is especially true of Nulls.

Nulls are the absence of data – as if someone skipped that cell in the database. The tricky part is that Nulls are not equal to zero. In fact, Nulls are not equal to any value.

This is a problem because throughout other reporting practices, Nulls wreak havoc! The most common example of this havoc is if you concatenate several strings of text (essentially gluing pieces of text together into one long text), a single Null in any part of the concatenation will make the whole result Null. In this latter case, imagine concatenating first names, middle initials, and last names into one field called “full name”; not everyone has a middle initial, and if the database has Nulls in the middle initial column, then some people will get Nulls for the “full name” field. It’s like saying “just because you don’t have a middle initial, you don’t get a full name.” And that’s just not fair!