Yessssss….My
Preciousssssss…
Can you imagine Golum as a Project Manager? Instead of a ring, though,
he’d be clutching a printout of the latest status report with his favorite
chart. It’s funny to picture. But I must admit: I’m starting to see
the attraction.
My Favorite Chart
I just returned from the Second Annual Workfront User Conference. It was my privilege
to speak for the second time. My presentation this year was "Four Webthings and a
Funeral" (NOTE: this is a BIG file), where I shared four of the
most important configurations we’d made to our Project Management Software.
The first was a chart called the Big Picture. It helped all our team members visualize
the progress of our Projects — Drilling Gas Wells, in our case — as
they moved from left to right through the various Phases of work. Here’s an
example:
The Big Picture
The main reasons that this chart is "Precious" to me are that
it is:
- Intuitive: in the beginning, all Projects were stacked on the left,
and at the end, they’ll all be on the right
- Scalable: no matter how many Projects there are, the Y-Axis
will adjust to accommodate
- Adaptable: the Phases can be redefined to suit any industry
- Data Driven: as Project Based Work progresses, the underlying data
drives each Project into the appropriate Phase
- Informative: grouping Projects by their overall schedule status
(Red = Late, Yellow = At Risk, Green = On Track) helps qualify the progress and
spot trends over time
- Functional: in Workfront, users can simply click a section of the chart
to drill down into the underlying Projects
Ring of Truth?
One of the promises of On-Demand Project Management is to give everyone
a common vision of what’s going on. If you have a standard process that can
be represented as an assembly line, I hope you’ll consider adopting a Big
Picture such as the one shown above. And if you don’t, perhaps you can forge
another to bind your team together.