Easy illustrations for your project meetings

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by Elizabeth Harrin

A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts. Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.

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Categories: team, tips

You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, at ProjectManagement.com this month we are really testing that theory with the features on visual project management. And not wanting to miss out, I thought I would share some drawing tips with you.

Drawing? If you are thinking now that you can’t draw, bear with me. By the end of this article you will be able to, I promise.

First, let’s think about why you should be using illustrations and pictures in your project meetings. It’s easy to come up with lots of reasons:

It’s fun
Drawings help explain complicated concepts
People remember drawings better than lists
Drawings help get everyone on the same page (ha ha! You know what I mean)
Drawings help remove misunderstandings about processes.

And I’m sure you can think of other reasons.

When can you use illustrations in your project meetings? There are lots of times when it is appropriate, for example:

Requirements elicitation workshops
Solution design workshops
Process workshops
Change management meetings
Long meetings that need something extra to keep the attendees engaged
Any time when you are facilitating a session and taking notes on a flip chart.

OK? Let’s get started.

Drawing people

I hated drawing at school so if I can do this, then anyone can. Think of people as a five-pointed star. Then replace the top point with a head, like in the illustration below. An easy person! You can make it look as if the person is pointing, and put them together around an object to represent breakout sessions or collaborative working.

It doesn’t take much to adapt the star concept to have pointy arms and lots of legs to represent a group. I know this particular group only has 5 legs which isn’t realistic. Six would have been better (although there are 4 heads in the front row so someone is still missing out). But you still know what it relates to, don’t you? You can see that this could represent a client group, a project team, a user community… anything.

Illustrating processes

Process maps are represented in a particular way when you are using Visio or similar to put them together in their final version. But in a workshop, you can have much more flexibility about how you draw out processes on flip charts or illustrate them on slides. And there are likely to be some processes that are discussed in meetings where you don’t want a full-blown detailed process map and a quick illustration to show that there is a process will do just fine.

Arrows are great as shortcut symbols for processes. It’s easy to draw a basic arrow, I’m sure everyone can do that. A few dotted lines and it becomes the most basic process diagram. You can write in the sections if you want to show what happens where (maybe useful for illustrating the project lifecycle in a kick off meeting?). Where your process has several different end points (like accept, reject or hold changes) you can give your arrow multiple-heads, like in the picture below.

One of my favourite types of arrow is the twisty one. It can stand for lots of things but it represents transformation. So something goes in, something happens and an output falls out the other side. It could mean that software code is quality checked, or that ‘the magic happens’ in a black box process that is being provided by a third party. But it is fiendish to draw, at least that’s what I thought.

I learned how to draw the twisty arrow and the other elements at the Oredev IT conference a few years ago, in a session about visual recoding. The speaker broke it down and I have done the same for you in the picture below.