We have an unnatural confidence in dashboards. When we see dashboard indicators we make all kinds of assumptions about them that may or not be true. But we depend on them all the same. This isn’t restricted to just project management dashboards though I have more experience with those than any others but dashboard indicators of all kinds. Think about this. When you are driving and you see a green light, don’t you go through…
The quest for a real-time dashboard would seem to be a perfect fit for project management data but there are assumptions that lie beneath the surface of EPM and PPM data that hold numerous challenges when we apply them to real time analysis.
Dashboards and creating beautiful and shiny indicators of performance are all the rage but how do you ensure that your heat maps, thermometers, speedometers and traffic light icons are showing you what’s useful?
Anyone who has worked with project management systems knows that the way you display data can dramatically affect the decions people make from it. This is why we often see GANTT charts with critical activities in red. I’m reminded of one of my very first sales of project scheduling software back in the 80’s. I don’t dare share the name of the organization but it was a large utility. We’d made this sale a few…