Programming as a soft skill for project managers: How to have a computer take over some of your work

Abstract

Large part of the project manager's work can be described in terms of retrieving, processing, analysing and synthesizing various types of data from different sources. The types of information become more and more diverse (including participants, task and financial details, and dates) and data volumes continue to increase, especially for large international collaborations. In this paper we explore the possibility of using the python programming language as a tool for retrieving and processing data for some project management tasks. python is a general-purpose programming language with a very rich set of libraries. In recent years python experienced explosive growth leading to development of several libraries that help to efficiently solve many data related tasks without very deep knowledge of programming in general and python in particular. In this paper we present some of the core python libraries that can be used to solve some typical project management tasks and demonstrate several real-world applications using a HORIZON 2020 type European project and as example.