When managing complex projects, you need a quick overview of the project that will allow you to immediately assess its overall condition. Where deal with any obstacles and anticipate possible delays. Discover the essential data visualization tools of piloting at the service of the project manager.
Major Data Visualization Tools in Project Management
Instead of overloaded spreadsheets, visualization tools give you the key data in a more convenient and understandable format. That allow you to make immediate changes to the project schedule.
Nowadays, many project management services offer such features. However before making a choice, it is important to assess their true business value. A good visualization tool is not just a source of beautiful graphics for your monthly presentations. It must offer you another look at project data analysis and improve the overall management experience.
At Write, we think about situations where visualization can really change the work and life of the project manager. That’s why today we would like to introduce you to the main visualization tools. In fact you need in your project management software that will ensure the success of your project.
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Gantt Chart
The Gantt chart makes it easy to create, preview, and update the entire project schedule. It’s important that your Gantt chart is not only a memo your team is interested in from time to time. However also an interactive tool that allows you to manage your project.
Using the chart, you can stagger projects over weeks or hours and quickly identify risky timelines using the colors in the taskbar. Red indicates overdue tasks, green indicates completed tasks, and blue indicates active tasks. Make sure that the Gantt chart supports drag-and-drop and automatically takes into account weekends. Actual features that will save you time when updating the calendar. Task dependencies are also an important feature for complex projects. If the start or end date of one task depends on another, they will be moved together. Milestones are important project events (eg, launch date)
In addition, the Interactive Gantt Chart allows all teams to be informed of the actual project schedule. Account managers receive automatic notifications of new deadlines without additional work from you, and you can easily grant calendar access to your customers, partners, or stakeholders.
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Workload Graph
Behind each project are dedicated people. This is why you should keep in mind that, in practice, the work balance turns out to be a bit more complex than creating workflow schemes. Some members of your team may be overworked while others may have no work to do in the work schedule.
The workload graph helps you manage that and make the most of your team’s resources. Domains in which employees have 3 or more tasks at the same time are highlighted in orange, allowing you to quickly identify them and assign tasks among team members.
You also have a base of all your pending tasks to be able to remove them and assign them to a person whose workload is less. The workload graph helps your team reduce stress and maximize work time.
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Dashboard
Any MBA book would tell you that micromanaging is a sin. However, keeping an eye on a lot of important tasks is unavoidable. It is too risky to exclude them from the special control of a project manager. You can then minimize the time and effort.
The dashboard gives you central control over the most important tasks across all projects, allowing a new or late assignment to go unnoticed. You can create different widgets to track:
- All late tasks for a certain project
- The tasks due the current week for the marketing department
- The tasks assigned to you
- Tasks completed during the current week by some team members, etc.
With real-time updated widgets, you can quickly check the status of any project and save time preparing for the weekly meeting update.
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Reports
Not only do you need to understand what’s going on, but you should also be able to explain it quickly and clearly to your manager, your clients or stakeholders. This is why reporting takes up most of the time of a project manager. Not only will interactive reports free you from this routine, but they will also provide executive information in an easy-to-understand chart format.
They allow you to separate information from the project according to customizable needs and to find information previously inaccessible or available only after several hours.
The following reports are those most often used by project leaders:
- Weekly Executive Update: Understanding the Number and Status of Projects by Owner
- Team Performance: Compare Individual Performance Using Key Indicators
- Projects at risk: get an overview of projects with too many tasks late
- Achievements: report on work done last week, last month or quarter
The ability to share reports with your team will move meetings forward more quickly and help you focus on workable items, not on collecting status updates.
As you can see, not only does the project’s visualization tools make life easier for the project manager, but they also ensure that everyone, whether management or team members, has immediate access. The real project data in the cloud, these tools will help you to better synchronize teamwork and help you avoid unnecessary risks. If you do not use any of the tools mentioned above, it’s time to try them out. Save time and effort to complete your projects.
Hello everyone! This is Richard Daniels, a full-time passionate researcher & blogger. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics. He loves to write about economics, e-commerce, and business-related topics for students to assist them in their studies. That's the sole purpose of Business Study Notes.
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