Visual Project Management
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About this ebook
Paul Williams
Professor Williams has had a long-standing research interest in geomorphology and hydrology and is a Fellow of the International Association of Geomorphologists. He is co-author of the seminal reference text ‘Karst Hydrogeology and Geomorphology’ and a senior advisor to IUCN/UNESCO concerning natural World Heritage.
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Visual Project Management - Paul Williams
Visual Project Management
Visual Project Management
Paul R. Williams, PMP
Think For A Change™ Publishing
Green Bay, Wisconsin USA
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Copyright © 2015 by Paul R. Williams, PMP
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First Printing: February 2015 via Lulu Press, Inc. and On-Demand via Amazon.com
ISBN 978-1-312-66522-4
Think For A Change™ Publishing
1678 Cady Lane
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Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
For Michelle…thank you for your patience, your willingness to listen without judgment, your gentle nudges in the right direction and your encouragement to take calculated risks. This thing we call life and a career has been a wonderful, interesting and blessedly rewarding journey thus far, and I wouldn’t change a single minute. Here’s to the second half!
***
If you don’t build your own dream, someone else will hire you to help build theirs.
– Tony A. Gaskins, Jr.
***
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it and share it with the world.
– Toni Morrison
Acknowledgements
Ultimately, the seed for this work was planted about seven or eight years ago while I was working as a senior project leader at a former employer. Sometime around the midpoint of my tenure there, I was invited to participate in a kaizen event (they were all the rage at the time) to improve the project management process. During a brainstorming exercise on how to communicate project status in a more executive-friendly manner, someone mentioned that a certain project manager, not in the PMO at the time, was consistently receiving high praise from executive leadership for his ability to deliver results and communicate effectively at their level. It turned out that this project manager was managing projects with far greater detail than anyone else in the organization. His projects were managed primarily on cost, balanced to the penny and brutally honest in the presentation of the project metrics. Most notable, however, were the project status binders he published, full of colorful graphs, charts and other data visualizations that allowed executives to fully and quickly understand the health of the projects they were sponsoring. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to see executives walking around with these binders under their arm as they moved from meeting to meeting. It was then that I realized the tremendous impact and potential that data visualization had in project management and leadership success. That project manager, Kent Holzworth, eventually became EPMO Director for the organization, not to mention my boss and mentor. Thanks to his leadership and guidance, I have had a very successful project management career following his model of presenting project facts, in an easy to understand manner, so decisions can be made quickly and with high confidence.
Also, special thanks to the many people who took time out of their busy lives to help proofread the early drafts, offer suggestions on edits, ensure I was attributing all of the quotes and usage of graphics and photographs correctly, and for simply playing the role of editor
as I was focused on trying to get these concepts down on paper.
For those who volunteered to review the final draft of this work and provide professional feedback, along with honest reviews and recommendations, I owe each and every one of you a debt of gratitude and thanks.
Finally, I want to recognize the many people who have attended my conference and workshop presentations regarding this topic and have shared feedback and encouraging remarks. Many of your suggestions have found their way into this work! And to those with whom I have had the pleasure of working directly within this visual project management niche over the course of the past decade, your ideas and recommendations have refined and improved the concepts, tools and thought leadership that you now see in use across the globe today. Thank you!
Introduction
My journey into this unique niche of the project management world came about as a result of two experiences, one of a more general nature and one quite specific. As anyone in the innovation management field can tell you, the best innovations typically come about from the combination of two widely disparate ideas. Combining visual thinking techniques with project management discipline has always seemed to be a natural fit to me. But it wasn’t until I started searching for other best practices of applying visual methods to project management that I realized there was virtually no thought leadership on this topic outside of some agile software development methodologies.
The first generalized influence that visual thinking had on my project management career stems from my life-long passion and professional experience in creative problem solving, ideation and innovation management. Within the unstructured realm of the fuzzy front end
of innovation, tools like mind-maps, sketches and infographics rule the day. These visual-based tools help to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas for further examination.
In the slightly more controlled processes of the messy back end,
where ideas and concepts become tangible, visual thinking tools organize the work flows, help with decision making and bring structure to a traditionally unstructured process. Visual management at this level improves stakeholder communication, facilitates robust cross-functional collaboration and brings clarity to complex processes and task lists.
The primary key influence, however, that visual thinking has had in my project management practice resulted from a very specific episode of workplace rebellion. I was working as a Senior Program Manager for a financial services company at the time. The organization had a well-defined project management process and methodology. Some would say the process was a bit too well-defined. The use of templates was not only encouraged, they were required. Teams of project auditors would occasionally troll through project documentation folders to verify that the templates were not only being used, but were not modified in any meaningful way. Consistency and conformance were the mantra.
As in most organizations with formal Project Management Offices, new concepts that were green-lighted for project initiation from the executive leadership ranks or through the budget appropriations process were asked to prepare a formal Request for Project Approval
document. This document artifact came in the form of a Microsoft PowerPoint® slide deck
and would be presented to the Project Approval Committee, made up of executive team members with titles like CFO, COO, CIO and the like. The RPA deck was a well-choreographed document with strict rules for what could and could not be included. Minimally encompassing eight pages of required
information, some legendary decks tipped the scales at twenty to thirty pages of extraneous information contained within the appendix of the document. Anyone who put material after the Appendix
title slide knew that the odds of any information actually being read post-meeting were a loser’s bet.
As a Senior Program Manager, my role included frequent trips to the Project Approval Committee for the presentation of project approval requests. In this role, I would build deck after deck after deck, each one staying within the PMO prescribed guidelines. Because these were C-level executives, the date and time of each Project Approval Committee meeting was set well in advance. The Project Leadership Team’s preparation time, however, would typically begin two to three weeks ahead of the actual meeting.
This process would start by taking selections of data from various project initiation documents such as the project charter, the budget worksheet or