Take a look

Visual management tools can help demystify project management and empower team members, say David Hart and Egor Sviridenko.

All project management professionals are familiar with elements of visual management: visual methods are a good way to represent large amounts of information or complicated concepts. We all use the Gantt chart as a means of articulating and communicating tasks, dependencies and timelines.

Most will also be familiar with other visual tools – graphs showing earned value or comparing budgeted and actual expenditure, or diagrams illustrating concepts such as product flow.

The common characteristic of all good visual tools is that they represent data in a way that conveys relevant information clearly and simply, enabling the right decisions to be made and appropriate actions to be taken.

The development of agile approaches, particularly in software projects, has also added a new dimension to visualisation. Not only do we have agile visual management tools like the Kanban board (a two-dimensional representation of work-package status) and burn-down chart, but the nature of agile development has demanded new visual project management tools that support effective team collaboration.

Our experience of using these visual tools in agile environments has led us to realise that visual approaches could be more effective than some of our traditional project management tools in other projects.

Particular features stand out. Information displayed in different ways is more accessible to team members (you don’t need to be an expert in MS Project to update your work plan); everyone has access to the same information, but it is displayed in a way that is relevant for them; and project managers can focus more on management than detail or process.

Visual management: the science  
Information visualisation seeks to exploit the relationship of the human eye and brain to enable people to see, explore and understand large amounts of information at once.

French cartographer Jacques Bertin developed many of the concepts upon which visual management is based. Effective visualisation of information involves two elements: visual variables and data organisation patterns.

Bertin suggested that there are two types of visual variables: planar and retinal. Planar variables display two quantitative parameters of an object in flat dimensions (X and Y) – see Figure 1. Retinal variables enable us to visualise more than two parameters at the same time through the use of colour, size, shape, texture, orientation and format/saturation etc – see Figure 2.

Combining planar and retinal variables provides the opportunity to visualise many more dimensions at the same time. For instance, on the Kanban board example, we could use size to indicate the amount of effort needed, or colour to indicate who is responsible for each work package.

Additional information can be visualised through further combining planar and retinal variables with the basic data patterns: networks (relations/dependencies), timelines (when something is happening) and category (grouping according to type).

In Figure 3, these elements are combined to show a portfolio of projects in a way that helps us to prioritise and decide which to do next. In this example, all potential projects (coloured shapes) are grouped vertically by their business value and horizontally by risk. Size represents the amount of effort or resource required for delivery, and colour represents the department or customer requesting the investment. It is clear that the small blue project in the upper right corner is a likely candidate to start next.

A range of visual management tools have been widely used in recent decades based around planning boards, card systems and, probably most commonly, white-boards and Post-it notes.

The drawback with all of these has been the lack of flexibility and the overhead maintenance. However, modern software overcomes these problems and enables us to use the full range of visualisation tools to present data in different ways for different audiences, giving everyone the information they need.

A Kanban board can’t tell us much about time availability or interdependencies between work packages, but the flexibility of software enables us to easily switch to a timeline or a network view of the same data.

Visual management: in practice
Visual management applies the techniques of information visualisation in a management context, giving project managers and teams more tools to understand the meaning of information and make the right decisions more easily.

The real benefits of visual management come from delivering projects and change outside of the traditional project management sectors of construction and engineering, usually in operationally-focused organisations and often in the public and not-for-profit sectors.

Project professionals working in these environments often work with team members who may not be project management experts. Adopting visual management approaches can demystify what we do. It can empower team members to take responsibility for their own work and encourage collaboration through shared visual representations, while retaining the ability of the project manager to remain in control.

Visual management software enables a project manager to configure the processes and controls in the background (whether these be agile, PRINCE2® or bespoke methods) and deliver visual presentations (views) of information to people in a way that is relevant and meaningful to them.

For example, a team member could see her tasks as a series of ‘cards’, perhaps organised by priority and grouped by status. When a task is complete she simply moves it to the completed category, updating the underlying data that also feeds the manager’s higher-level control views.

People respond to information presented in a way that is personal and seen as relevant. Robust and effective project controls and effective governance are critical to the success of projects.

Visual management doesn’t in any way challenge the best-practice tools and methods we already have. What it does do, though, is provide an alternative and complementary way of presenting information and enabling control, particularly in situations where implementing and maintaining good practice needs a more creative approach  

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David Hart is director and principal consultant at E AND H.
Egor Sviridenko managing director of TargetProcess Germany.