Frictionless Perspectives with Brian Swanson
- Anna Maria Island, Florida, October 2025
Data projects impact people from all areas of a company, at every level. You’re managing change, not just projects—something technical people haven’t prepared for at all. We could use some help to navigate those changes.
Brian Swanson is Vice President of Project Management in the financial services industry. He’s also a trusted friend I worked alongside at Maxim Integrated. Brian’s empathetic yet bold approach to managing projects virtually guarantees success, and his integrity inspires the people around him.
I recently sat down with Brian to tap into his expertise. Here’s a project manager’s perspective on delivering frictionless data solutions.
You’ve worked across many industries - telecommunications, consulting, semiconductors, and financial services. What best data practices have you seen? What made them good or bad?
Here’s the bottom line: data runs the business, feeds the decision-making process, and ultimately determines success or failure. Some of the good things I’ve seen include:
Data warehouse solutions, accessible to end users for running their own reports.
- Reporting tools that provide a common framework for end users to generate their own reports without engaging the reporting team every time.
- Consistent nomenclature that limits ambiguity – it seems simple, but when not done well, the average person can’t understand how to access the information they need.
I’ve also seen some bad practices:
- Replicating business application logic in the reporting layer – taking raw data and applying business logic to generate reports. When anything changes in the application, the reports must also change. This results in logic errors and inconsistent answers.
- Unclear data refresh intervals result in decisions based on out-of-date reports.
Data quality often derails projects. Can a project manager change this?
Too often, reporting is an afterthought on projects where a shiny new piece of functionality is the focus of the team. Reporting and data quality must be part of the culture of the organization, just part of the day-to-day operations and part of every single project, enhancement, and defect fix.
How do you make feedback a normal part of project work?
From the beginning of a project, I establish an open-door policy for the project team and leadership. Everyone has a voice and an opportunity to share their thoughts, concerns, and opinions. Throughout the project, I take it a step further by reaching out to the project team as a group and individuals to ask what is working well and what could use more attention.
Then, I monitor the non-verbal queues – the sentiment of the team and their morale, for example. You can learn a lot about the team through their attitude and the quality of their engagement. From there, I reach out as needed to solicit feedback on how they feel things are going.
Where do enterprise transformation projects go wrong?
No matter the best intentions of the team, projects struggle because of the lack of upfront business preparation. True transformation first takes a deep understanding of business processes – both as-is and to-be – and it takes time to define the correct to-be process. In reality, as soon as people sign contracts, the clock starts, so to speak, and there is a rush to start executing at the expense of the necessary up-front work.
As an IT Leader, it is important to force pauses in the project. It doesn’t have to be a long pause, but there should be a reconciliation between the project charter and what is really happening. Regular check-ins ensure the original project goals are met.
What does a good problem statement look like?
Business requirements are an extremely under-resourced aspect of solutioning. Companies “promote” good developers to business analysts with no additional training, even though the skillset is very different. Business sponsors are tasked with defining requirements without any guidance or standards. This cripples projects from the very beginning – not because people don’t want to do the right thing, but because they’re not given any process, structure, procedure, or standard process for defining requirements.
Bottom line – there needs to be a clear understanding of “what problem are we trying to solve” for almost every single activity across the organization. If you can’t articulate a specific problem, then why are you really doing an activity?
If you had a chance to speak directly to a group of 150 CIOs and CFOs, what would you tell them about project management?
Great project management is not just about tasks, action items, and schedules. It is about building trust relationships between business teams and delivery teams, ensuring that everyone is on the same page, and working towards the same goals. Great project managers remove obstacles, ask tough questions, and feel like they own the business value being delivered just as much as the business sponsor and project teams.
To help remind you of these concepts, I’m now adding a hit 80s song to theFrictionless Data Spotify playlist each week. This week, enjoy Why Me? by Planet P Project.