A Visual Approach to Project and Portfolio Monitoring

Project managers increasingly rely on software support for monitoring status and development of projects gathered in large portfolios. The status of a project is characterized by a large number of mostly numerical parameters. Various chart visualisations are commonly used to express parameters, provide aggregation and support comparison. We propose a visual representation which encodes the parameters defining a project's status into a single project symbol. We also propose to visualise project portfolios by applying a two-dimensional layout to collections of project symbols. The resulting project portfolio visualisations empower users to monitor the progress and status of each project, discover outliers, and identify project groups sharing common properties. A user evaluation of the project symbol and of the portfolio visualisations was performed providing directions for further improvements.