If you mark tasks as estimated in Microsoft Project, it’s a good idea to mark them as estimated in OnePager as well. This helps your audience understand that the dates in your Gantt chart aren’t firm and are subject to change:
Here’s how estimated tasks appear in Microsoft Project:
Did you know that OnePager can automatically remove inactive tasks from your report, even if you still have them flagged for import in Microsoft Project?
Let’s start with a simple Microsoft Project schedule. Notice that all five tasks are active, and all five tasks have “Flag 20” set to “Yes”:
It’s not very often that you might need to look at your entire plan to pick out some sort of pattern. Analyzing our project data is usually not as simple as that.
However, when you’re looking to evaluate the timing of your risk and exposure to outside forces, it becomes important to step back and view the entire project.
In Stephen Few’s book Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis, the chapter on Time-Series Analysis and Heatmaps is very relevant to this specific data visualization in OnePager.
Heatmaps, according to Few, are “any display that uses color to encode quantitative values.” Below is an example of a traditional heatmap.
Our friends at MPUG have published my article on why project managers should create a portfolio of past projects when applying for a new PM job, instead of just the traditional resume:
Consider Bringing a Portfolio to Your Next PM Job Interview
Create a portfolio of past projects when applying for your next PM job.
In the article, I cover how to select which projects to include, and how to go about the mechanics of creating a portfolio of projects that will resonate with prospective employers. The article also includes a sample portfolio of projects to provide an illustration of what employers might be looking for.
If you’re not already an MPUG member or don’t receive their newsletter, it’s worth signing up. MPUG provides great content for the project management community, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time working with Microsoft Project.
In last week’s post on project cost tracking, we happened to use an animated GIF of a OnePager Gantt chart to illustrate how project costs changed over time. Since then, several customers have reached out asking how to do the same thing.
These animated .gif files can be inserted into a SharePoint Image Web Part, PowerPoint documents, and other office documents, to be included in your reporting.
This week’s post will show you step-by-step instructions on how to animate your OnePager Gantt chart, like this:
Did you know that OnePager 6.0 gives you new ways to track cost information from your project plan?
I love this topic because it elicits a higher level of thought around designing the data visualizations we need in planning, in a way that my simple mind can consume.
In her book “Storytelling with Data,” Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic points out very early on that there are really two kinds of data visualizations: exploratory and explanatory. Exploratory visuals are created to help us figure out what the important things are within the data…they have an analytical purpose. Explanatory visuals are meant only to show us the important things…there should be little to no intended analytical value. Continue reading
Last week, we talked about setting up enterprise flag fields. This week, we’ll be talking about the other kind of flags, and how to include them on your OnePager timeline.
Short answer: Never.
Long answer: Summary tasks are a collection of one or more child tasks. By definition, a summary task doesn’t represent any real work, resources, or deliverables, so summary tasks are neither on nor off the critical path of a project. Children of summary tasks can be on the critical path, assuming those children are not summary tasks themselves.
…Well, in plan communications and Gantt charts, it does.
Size, when used as an attribute to denote meaning in data visualization, will likely force our brain to look at the largest items first. In her book “Storytelling with Data,” Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic tells us that “Relative size denotes relative importance.”