The UK Government publish an annual report on their top 143 projects but does it really illustrate the performance of the portfolio? James Smith has been instrumental in collating information distributed across nearly 90 separate spreadsheets to develop insights into how data analytics can help to shine a light on performance and challenge how approx £450 billion investments into public projects is reported. He will also be sharing some emerging insights from similar data within the US and Australia which help to illustrate the art of the possible and how this could influence project and portfolio level reporting within the UK.

He will take us through the challenges of defining the problem statement, into automated web scraping and data extraction, then into some of the issues with data visualisation. Lastly, he will be sharing some fascinating insights into the data, areas of interest and some of the challenges that need to be considered.

It promises to be a fascinating presentation that delves into a topic of huge relevance to all of us; if the portfolio increases by 10% it is the equivalent of one year of the annual defence budget and overseas aid budget combined.

We will also be following up the presentation up with a 45 min workshop to exchange ideas on how to exploit some of the methods and also share ideas on potential improvements.

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