Project portfolio dashboard

Ganesh

Communication effectiveness is more difficult to measure than efficiency.

Measures I have seen
- meeting attendance
- email responsiveness/reminders needed
- download counts
- team surveys
- adhering to deadlines, e.g. providing project dara updates to the dashboard
- # of 1:1 exchanges per week

Thomas

It fully depends on the information people that need to take decisions need to see. Information, not data. Data must be converted into information. So, in my actual work place, we have a "one page" dashboard with 5 "traffic lights" indicators. This is enough for key stakeholders in my actual work place. BUt it could be not enough for others.

Hi Ganesh,

The purpose of the dashboard is to provide the project stakeholders, with a high level one page view of the project health, progress and cost/schedule and risks (if any) information for each of the projects displayed.

At a program level your KPIs may be different. (Work with your upper management and stakeholders to see what they want to look at.)

The KPIs we use currently for seeing each Project health include the following:

a) Project health indicator that includes (Cost/Schedule) aligning to a Project Objective with any of the three colors (Green,Red,Yellow).

b) Risks/Concerns - if any. (Risk is constantly monitored)

c) This week's accomplishments.

d) Next week's activities or plan.

Usually, a dashboard must be a one page or one board view with all programs or projects listed. Not sure how many projects or programs you have. If there are too many programs you handle, it might be advisable to use a digital workbook where in clicking into the button leads to more details. (OR if it can be accommodated on a big board, then well and good).

As far as considering communication effectiveness, it may not be worth to monitor it as a KPI. You as a program manager must be engaged and make sure the team is responding to requests and communicating at all levels (within team, at department level, with customers and all other stakeholders including your upper management).

Measuring outcomes or results is far more important to see if communication is working the right way or not.

(I would say Stakeholder engagement must really show if communication is happening the right way or not. An engagement matrix may be developed. But this is just my opinion.)

And if you really want to measure communication, the emails now a days have enhancements which track down such things. (See the analytics portion of the emails, it tells if a person is passive and how long since he or she has not answered emails or has no activities going on for example whether it be Outlook or Lotus notes or any other software your organization uses.) Probably, you can extract a bit of data from here, do an analysis and use it as a Communication KPI. The only cavet, to this is your employees may see you as a Micro Manager if you are doing this.