You’re probably familiar with Gantt charts, which show project tasks, their duration, and their completion dates. For a specific project, project managers and executives use Gantt charts to quickly review upcoming activities.
When reviewing a portfolio of projects, project managers sometimes continue to use Gantt charts, adding upcoming tasks for all projects to a single chart and sorting by task start date. These consolidated Gantt charts are sometimes referred to as ‘key event maps’, because they show key events across a portfolio.
Excerpt from a key event map; when key event maps go on for rows and rows, they are difficult to read.
With many tasks across many projects, we find these key event maps hard to parse. A key event map might have dozens or hundreds of lines, making it difficult to find what is happening next across a set of projects.
We recently introduced a new visualization, flag charts (see them in action here), for communicating upcoming events across a portfolio of initiatives. Unlike Gantt charts, which use multiple rows for activities and tasks, our flag chart uses callouts attached to a single timeline, and adjusts the positioning of the callouts based on their timing and number. But rather than try to describe it further, take a look at a sample in the figure below.
Our clients love flag charts because they help communicate upcoming milestones quickly and effectively. They also save tons of time because with Enrich Analytics they now create them with a few clicks. If you or your team have been building these charts by hand in PowerPoint or an illustration program, you know exactly what I’m talking about!
Each year, tens of billions of dollars in R&D investments are shaped, allocated, and refined with the help of Enrich’s EAP. Are you interested in learning how we can help streamline your portfolio reviews, turning months of long nights and frustration into a value-enhancing, confidence-affirming exercise for your R&D organization? Contact us, and learn what our clients already know about the value of the Enrich Analytics Platform.
