Identifying important skills set to support reporting and analyzing in project management

Purpose: The article presents the results of qualitative research related to identifying the set of skills needed in project management business analysis. Design/methodology/approach: To recognize the set of skills, it was important to focus on three pivotal issues, starting with specifying which layers of business analysis in project management can be extracted, then answering the question of which IT tools are to be used in this analysis as well, and which skills are needed to perform in it. The main research method was participation observation by way of the author’s involvement in a project management team. Findings: The following layers of business analysis in project management were established: 1) data management, 2) intelligent calculations, 3) delivery mode, 4) consumption device, 5) business enablement. The most important skills are as follows: joining disparate data sources, cleaning data, organizing data better, creating calculations, adjusting visualizations to the tools used by end-users to consume visualizations. MS Excel and MS Access were found to be valuable tools used in this analysis. Originality/value: New in the paper is an examination of the set of skills needed in the project management business analysis in the context of applying MS Excel and MS Access.