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Xcelsius Dashboard - Project Management

Update: Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard example

ALso, this post on Designing Dashboard Alerts has become very popular. Be sure to check it out.

Dashboard

Topic: Project Health Dashboards

Dashboards are best experienced through working demos. Well, actually, they are best experienced as a regular user on the actual implementation, but let’s assume you can’t get someone to grant you hands-on-the-keyboard access. Most of the time on this blog when we discuss business dashboards, we have to settle with screenshots and descriptions. Sometimes, however, a Dashboard Spy reader will lead us to a working prototype or demo so that we can experience the interactivity of the system first hand. This is especially critical with the current generation of rich interface applications.

Today, courtesy of Inverra.com, we look at a demo of a Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius dashboard. This dashboard was implemented for the project management staff at a large company to check on the in-flight status and health of their projects. Here is the link to the project management dashboard demo and here is a screenshot:

Project Management Dashboard

Take a look at the layout and you’ll see that the top section of the dashboard contains a branding area, a project objectives portlet, a section featuring the execution governance team (a nice way to use vanity eye candy to appeal to the project sponsors) and a Progress to Date portlet.

Below that area, we have the main dashboard section with the following portlets:

Overall Performance, Project Manager news (Stakeholder headlines, Key risks and Mitigation strategies, and upcoming events), the main In-Flight Project Health Assessment Panel with the KPI categories of Project Execution, Customer Feedback, Project Team Capability, Budget and Supporting Technology, and 3 charts: Earned Value, Opportunity Cost and External spend.

The controls are interactive as they are Xcelsius-based. If you click on the question mark, you get help such as this dashboard indicator legend:

dashboard icon legend

Be sure to try out the demo so that you see how the rollover effects work.

Here is what the dashboard designer at Inverra had to tell me about this dashboard:

This project dashboard was developed for the EPMO in a Fortune 250
organization. The client wanted a consistent method to track the health of
projects which are in-flight. The PMs wanted something simple and easy to
update and the Execs wanted to focus on the hotspots quickly. The process
has worked quite well, particularly the standardized metrics and
definitions. The PMs also like the opportunity to input written comments so
they can ‘tell their story’ to their execs quickly. The dashboard is used
within the teams but more importantly tends to be on the agenda of the
steering committees / governance groups of the 30 or so in-flight projects.
Inverra has additional dashboard samples at www.inverra.com that you may be
interested in.

Tags: Xcelsius Dashboard Demo, Project health Dashboards, Project metrics and KPIs

Update:

Related Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius Dashboards to check out:

Business Objects Xcelsius Demo Dashboard

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Last Modified: Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 @ 12:28

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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