digital dashboard

[stormcloudgathering]

Hi chaps

Project server 2003
project pro 2003 PWA

Win 2000 Pro

I see this thing called a digital dashboard and wonder what it is, what the benefits of using it are, where I can get it from, do I need programming skills to implement it.
Any suggestions/advice will as always be very gratefully received

thanks
lynne

 

[zencalc]

Digital Dashboards are ways to show high-end stakeholders (usually executive managment) a progress report without having to read rows of numbers and columns. They are most useful for giving snapshots of a group of projects (THE Portfolio) to show performance against the baseline with regards to schedule, cost and deliverables. Most of the ones I've seen are formatted to use red, yellow and green indicators to show the status of a particular item. There is an add-on piece to MS Project 2003 called Business Intelligence (free download), that uses OLAP analysis to create nice pretty pictures for the execs, but also the ability to drill down into a particular item to see the numbers behind them. One of the really nice things about the web access piece is that you can then create reports that the user can have sent to them on their desktop, and when they open the document, it is still linked to the database, meaning that the status reports are real time!
There is significant programming necessary to make these things work, but the real-time reporting makes it well-worth it for project portfolio managment, IMHO...
Brian

 

[PDQBach]

Just a few additional comments.

First, the OLAP cube does not provide realtime access to the information. The cube generation (which takes a non-trivial amount of time) is a snapshot at a particular moment. Any drilldowns are drilldowns into that particular moment.

Second, green/yellow/red are the standards but the numbers behind those standards are the ones that count. You can set it up so that red represents 20% over budget and yellow is 10% over. So what? A trivial project that is 20% over is nothing; a core project that is 1% over is something.

Finally, most thoughtful organizations are more interested in Earned Value and, more particularly, Earned Value trends. A project which is 20% over budget and has been for 3 months is less important than a project that was 5% over 3 months ago, 10% over 2 months, 15% over last month and 20% over this month.