How to Create Your Project Dashboard

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How to Create Your Project Dashboard

A "Project Dashboard" is a tool that provides you with a graphical view of the progress of your project, so that you can see at a glance whether you're on track. It's basically a set of Charts that gives you the current status of the project at any time. You can create the Charts manually in Excel, or use smart software that does it for you.

To create your own Project Dashboard in Excel, take these steps:

Step 1: Get a Pen and Paper
Sit down with a pen and paper and list the things that determine whether your project will be a success. It might be that your project is delivered on time and under budget. Or that tasks are completed when expected and that your resources are perfectly allocated. It's these types of things that your Dashboard needs to track, every day.

Step 2: Gather your Data
Then collate all of the data that is needed to measure the success criteria you've defined above. The data may exist in Project Plans, Excel spreadsheets or Word documents. It might exist also in Timesheets, Expense Forms and risk / issue / change logs. Remember, the quality of your Dashboard depends on the quality of the data that goes into it.

Step 3: Sift, Sort and File
You then need to sift through your data, sort it into groups and file it all in one place, so that you have the right information needed, to populate your dashboard.

Step 4: Create your Dashboard
You're now ready to build your project dashboard. Enter all of your data into a single spreadsheet and create the following charts to create your Project Dashboard:

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  Time Chart: This chart tells you whether you're on schedule. You need to list your tasks and identify the planned versus actual percent complete for each task. Summarize this data and you'll find out whether you're ahead or behind schedule.
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  Cost Chart: To find out if you're under or over budget, you need to add up all of your project costs and compare them to your budget. To do this, calculate the cost of your resources, as well as equipment, materials and any expense forms completed by staff.
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  Tasks: You need to know the percentage of tasks that have been completed to date, so that you can get a feel for how much of the project has been done. List all of your tasks and identify whether they have been "Not Started", are "In Progress" or "Complete".
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  Resource: It's important to know whether your resources are over-worked. To calculate this, list all of your resources and work out how many calendar days they have scheduled for the project. Then identify from your task list, how many days they have been assigned to tasks. If they have been assigned to tasks for more days than they have available in their calendar, then they are "over-resourced" and you need to reduce their workload.
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  Risks: Every project involves risks, issues and changes. Make sure these are documented and identify whether each is low, medium or high impact. Then sum them up to find out how "at risk" your project is.

Step 5: Review it Daily
A fully populated dashboard will tell you at a moments glance, whether you're on track. You need to populate your dashboard each and every day, to have the best chance of success.

 - Uday Mahajan.

Make or buy Your Project Methodology?

            Before we help you find an answer to this question, let's define what a "methodology" is. A methodology is a pre-defined set of steps that describe how a project should be managed, from end-to-end. It sets out what needs to be done, by whom, when and how. It also describes how time, cost, quality, change, risks and issues should be managed to ensure that the project delivers on time and under budget.

It gives you a complete delivery roadmap so that you can manage projects in the same way every time, delivering projects faster and more efficiently than before.

So should you create this roadmap (or "methodology") from scratch, or should you buy it off the shelf? Here are the steps you need to take to make that decision:

Step 1: Analyze your Environment

How successful are projects in your Company? Which projects fail and which succeed? Why are project late? Which problems commonly occur? Do all teams use the same project processes? Which processes work efficiently and which need improvement?

By answering these questions, you can identify the common problems in your project environment and list the areas that need to be improved.

Step 2: Define your Requirements

After you've identified the problem areas and the processes that need to be improved, you're ready to define your requirements for a project methodology.

Define exactly what it is that you want from your methodology. Which processes do you require, and at which level of depth. For instance, do you need detailed processes to help you plan projects, or do you want procedures for contracting and managing suppliers.

Document your requirements in as much depth as possible and mark them as either mandatory or optional.

Step 3: List the solutions

Great, so you know exactly what it is that you want from a methodology. You now have 3 options ahead of you:

a) Create a new methodology from scratch.

If you have in-house project experts with the time available to create a new detailed methodology, then this is a good option for you. They will need to run workshops to define the overall project life cycle, reference best practices and standards when documenting the processes and implement training courses to roll out your new methodology for your organization.

It's a huge amount of work and will take considerable time, but it may be worth it.

b) Buy a new methodology off the shelf.

These days you can buy, download and implement a project methodology in minutes. The advantage is that it saves you months of work and energy rather than having to create one from scratch. The disadvantage is that it may not perfectly fit your project environment and you will need to train all of your staff in the new processes and procedures included.

This option is best for smaller companies running smaller projects, as they usually don't have the time to create a methodology from scratch and they need to improve their project delivery rate quickly, as their project success directly affects their company profitability.

c) Buy and customize a methodology.

If you already have some project processes that work for you, but you simply want to improve certain areas of your project environment, then the best option is to buy a customizable methodology, upload your existing processes and quickly create a new customized project framework that perfectly fits your environment

You will be able to immediately adopt new processes that are based on worldwide project management standards, while still using your existing processes that work well for you currently. It usually takes 1-2 weeks to merge your existing processes with the methodology your purchase, saving you months of hard effort and giving you a customized methodology which is a perfect fit for your environment.

Step 4: Rank the options

Once you've identified each of the potential options available, you will want to rank them in terms of their:

• Total cost and effort required
• Ability to meet your requirements set
• Handling of different project sizes.

Step 5: Make your decision

Based on the amount of time, expertise and budget you have available, you should now be able to make a clear decision as to whether you should make from scratch, buy & implement or buy & customize a project management methodology for your project environment.

And just one further tip: If you decide to "buy" a methodology, then make sure that it:

• Is completely customizable.
• Is based on worldwide standards
• Handles all types and sizes of projects
• Can quickly and easily be implemented
• Is simple to follow and adds real value to your projects.

So that's it. You can follow these 5 steps to make your decision on whether to make or buy a project methodology, to improve your success in delivering projects.

Uday Mahajan

5 Steps to Starting a New Project

If you're starting a new project, then there are 5 steps that every Project Manager must take, to ensure it's successful delivery.

Step 1: Get the Vision

The first thing you need to do is to sit down with your Project Sponsor and agree on what needs to be delivered and by when. You need a hard and fast project end date. You need to understand why this end date is important to the business and the impact if you go past it. Only then, will you have a solid stake in the ground, against which you can measure progress.

Step 2: Hire the Best

Great teams deliver great projects. So it's critical that you hire the best people you can afford to bring on board. Try and "borrow" experts from within the business, and "beg" your Sponsor for more cash to recruit the best in the market. Don't fall for lesser skilled people that you can find more easily. It always takes time to find top people, but they will deliver better results in a faster period of time. And they will be easy to manage!

To hire the best, make sure you've clearly specified the roles first. Then advertise the roles widely within and outside the organization. Keep the initial interviews short (30 minutes) and interview as many people as possible. Put less than 5 people through to a second interview and only 2 on your shortlist, before selecting your final candidate.

Step 3: Set the Scope

With a great team and a clear delivery date, the next step is to define what it is that the project has to deliver. This is called the "project scope" and it needs to be documented in depth!

List every project deliverable and describe it in as much detail as possible. You need to work closely with your customer (or the business) with this, because the deliverables need to meet their requirements and deliver the stated business benefits.

Step 4: Determine if it's Feasible

Now you need to know if you can produce the deliverable with the time-frame and resource available. In short, you need to know if the project is "feasible" or not.

To determine this, you need to work out how long each deliverable will take to produce and how much resource is required to produce it. You then need to add up all of the time-frames and all of the resource hours and check that they fit in with your resource budget and project delivery date. If they don't, then you have 3 options: Get more time, find more resource or reduce the scope of the project. It's that simple!

Step 5: Take Control and run with it

If your project passes the feasibility test, then you're ready to go! You need to plan your project and manage it day-to-day.

Uday Mahajan