Any experienced project managers out there wanna give some free advice to a (relatively) inexperienced project manager on the best way to visually present complex project workload/timeline information?
My unit is overwhelmed and I’ve managed to finagle a meeting with our Vice Chancellors for research, finance et al., plus the Grand PoohBah himself next week. I’m trying to find a nice way to build a series of spreadsheets showing the amount of work my little team is expected to do, and use this as a plug for recruiting a couple of extra programmers and maybe a student or two (as well as promoting my poor IT II to Sys Admin).
But we have around twenty projects split between two database systems (both in the middle of overhaul & final development), being run by 9 people loosely divided into two teams (depending on which database they work on).
I need to show how busy we are with test and development on one hand as well as our ludicrous scientific workload on the other. Needs to have names, details, staff members, funding levels (and funding opportunities)…in a current snapshot + future timeline sort of format.
Right now, I have one “overview” page, and am tempted to a 20 tab deep sheet with each project in detail. Then do one in financial detail, and then one with a future timeline in detail…but that is a clusterfuck messy file…
…If the worst comes to worst I’m going to present the State of the Unit in interpretive mime…
I am not a proper, professional project manager, but those who I work with seem to use excel for relatively simplish projects and MS Project for more complicated ones. I suppose one could not really call either of them very visual, though they do tend to have a pretty selection of colours. Sometimes I wonder if the assignment of the colours, et al., is more complicated than the project itself, though.
First, KISS
No, not that. Your mind is wandering. What kind of blog platform do you think this is?
No, not them either. Do at least try to keep up.
By ‘KISS’ I mean Keep It Simple, Stupid. These are busy people you’re trying to impress, in a short space of time. Detail is Death!
Second, if you have supporting material, include as much background as you want, but the Grand PooBah won’t read any of this. What all Grand PooBahs appreciate is a short (one page) ‘Executive Summary’ that tells them all they need to know, in just enough detail so that they can
bullshitinform other Grand PooBahs in such a way that it looks like all their own work.@Maxine: Thanks for the heads up. I have a few spreadsheets in Excel…no colours though… :)
@HG: Excellent advice
for a changeas usual. I decided on an executive summary approach to back up my spreadsheets. But it’s now two pages long and not very executivey…