Dashboard

Topic: Project Management Dashboards

Information Technology department managers know the difficulty of allocating human resources across multiple projects. What is the correct level of staffing necessary to both handle the workload quickly yet also be most cost effective? Obviously you can staff for maximum load, but the cost would be too high. Conversely, you can run a barebones staff, and save on budget, but then your capacity is constrained. How to strike a balance?

From a few years back comes this project/resource executive dashboard from http://www.innerfacedesign.com/pr_pipeline.html. It’s a fine looking dashboard by a talented designer that tracks projects not only from a current load perspective, but also from a pipeline viewpoint. On the top of the screen we have projects (current, pipeline and backlog). On the bottom of the screenshot we see resources by role and their utilization. This example uses a scenario of a User Interface Design Group and their project pipeline. The manager using this executive dashboard would look to balance the resources with the shifting project pipeline to try to optimize his productivity. Interesting graphical approach to a common departmental problem.

Tags: Project Management Dashboard, Business intelligence project management dashboards

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.