Whether you are a “visual” person who prefers to see something in order to get a better understanding of it, or an “auditory” person who prefers to hear something in order to get a grasp of a concept when it comes to project management a visual planning system is a good way forward for everyone.
This is particularly true if you are meeting your project scheduling requirements, doing status reports for your projects, or looking at resource management. It’s also a great way of sharing information within your organisation. So, when it comes to project management visual is a great way forward. Whether you prefer graphs, charts, percentages, reports, or presentation slides you will be able to lay out all the information you need to know about where your project is at, and where it’s going. But the way in which you prefer to see such data could depend on a variety of factors.
Gantt charts
If you want a visual representation of how your full project will look, then a Gantt chart is a great way forward. You can represent each task and your Gantt chart visual view can include completed work, dates, resources you have assigned, and all dependencies – they can all be integrated.
You can also use a Gantt chart for analysis and budget forecasting. There are so many different ways that you can actually display the information that you want visually and of course you can tailor it to your audience whether they are your project team or the customer.
Information is a critical factor and how you deliver it is really important to both the end user in terms of adoption and comprehension. One of the things you are likely to take away from any project manager course is that finding the right project management software package, one that offers you the best visual tools and is of course easy to use, is incredibly important.
Dashboard reporting both meaningful and configurable
A lot of the project management tools that are available have dashboards, in some cases highly configurable ones, but if you cannot use them exactly as you want to then it is time to look at other tools, because there will certainly be one that will work for you.
The best tool will be one that is easy-to-read, can be customised easily and offers you a project status dashboard that can be used on your current project or across a range of projects. This will offer information to both the project team and client that is meaningful. If also shows the big picture to the management.
Easy to use
A project planning tool that is easy to use will offer some drag and drop features – for example creating and moving tasks, creating dependencies, and adding resources. These are the project management skills that you will need to go through in order to prepare for your weekly meetings and customer calls. Making sure that things are as visual as possible can be very helpful especially if you want to make things as clear as possible for your audience.
