Manage Your Project Using V-Model Methodology

Understand the Purpose of Management Dashboards

When you’re leading a project, you need certain indicators to help you understand the general state of play within the project team. If you want to monitor things effectively, you’ll need a management dashboard.

A management dashboard is a visual interface that brings together all the information required to view the progress of a project.

It presents a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you to:

• track project progress.

• make decisions.

• modify activities.

• assess the gap between objectives and actual results.

In summary, it gives you a quick overview of the project status.

Let’s imagine that a task is taking longer than planned or that the project costs are starting to exceed the initial planned budget. A dashboard displaying this information will enable you to be more responsive. You’ll notice problems with any indicators displaying anomalies and will then be able to make the right decisions to keep things on track.

The management dashboard is designed for all project decision-makers, since there might be several stakeholders involved in making decisions. To ensure that choices are made effectively, it’s useful for everyone to have the same level of information.

As project manager, you will take the lead in setting up the dashboard. In some cases, where a project is particularly complex or involves processing large amounts of data, it might be necessary to ask data manipulation or visualization specialists to help you. These people are experts in building dashboards to support decision-making.

Define Objectives

Before setting up your dashboard, it’s essential to ask yourself the right questions:

• What is the primary objective of this dashboard?

• What data is needed to feed into the dashboard?

• How often will the dashboard be refreshed?

• ​​How can I present the dashboard to make it easy to read and intuitive?

• What decisions will the dashboard help us to make?

Taking some time to think before setting up your interface is key in building effective project steering tools. Otherwise, you’ll run the risk of leaving out strategic information and focusing on secondary data instead. It’s not all about having a dashboard with masses of data, but filtering to get the relevant information.

Define KPIs

Once you’ve clarified your dashboard objectives, you can define the key performance indicators to ensure that you’re monitoring the project effectively and running it successfully.

• Planning and tracking
  First of all, you need to have a clear overview of the progress of your project. You could monitor your progress percentage within the different phases, check whether deadlines are being met, and view the length of any delays.

  These indicators will give you an accurate idea of project progress against the initial plan.

• Quality
  Throughout the project, you need to also be aware of the defect rate discovered during testing, the percentage of defects corrected, and the number of retest cycles required. These KPIs will help you ensure high-quality deliverables.

• Resources and budget
  Effective monitoring is needed to ensure good resource and budget management. For example, you could monitor budget spend, resource efficiency, and rate of resource usage. These indicators will enable you to optimize resource allocation and keep an eye on the budget.

• Communication and teamwork
  Communication is also an important element within your KPIs. Make sure to monitor the number of meetings held, meeting attendance rate, and the number of collaboration tools used. These KPIs will help you to ensure a good flow of information within the team. 

• Risks and issues
  When you’re monitoring risks, you need to keep an eye on the number of risks identified during analysis or over the course of the project, the percentage of medium and high risks, and the number of unresolved issues. These indicators will enable you to take action to help you avoid any potential blockers.

• Client satisfaction
  Finally, remember that your client is the central focus of the project. Monitor client satisfaction rate, the number of changes requested by the client, and their acceptance rate for project deliverables. These KPIs will give you a valuable indication of how your client feels about the project.

Collect the Data

Once you’ve selected your project KPIs, you need to collect the right data to design a suitable dashboard.

An important question, therefore, is how can you collect data effectively? Although some tools provide default configurations, these don’t always meet your specific needs. Not surprisingly, it’s quite common to have to build a customized dashboard.

Let’s take a look at the steps that will guide you through the process of collecting and using your data in a custom-built dashboard.

• Identify data sources
  Before launching into your data collection, you’ll need to determine exactly where the data you need—such as the defect or bug rate—is held.

  Is this data built into the tool you’re using for your dashboard? Or does it come from an external source, such as a database? You need to identify the data source because this will determine how you’re going to retrieve the data.

  Also, don’t forget to check the data’s reliability and update frequency to ensure that your dashboard remains accurate.

• Install data collection tools
  To pull the data together in real time or at specific intervals, it’s best to choose dedicated project management tools, such as MS Project, Jira, Monday, or other specialized tools.

  These tools enable you to collect the vast majority of your data automatically to help you build your dashboard.

However, if you’re not able to obtain any data automatically, you could check progress reports and meeting minutes, or you could interview team members to ask for the information you need.

Analyze and Visualize the Data

You’ve successfully built your dashboard, and it’s displaying results in numeric format. You’re probably wondering how you can use this data.

The first step is to regularly analyze the dashboard to understand any gaps between expected and actual results.

The causes won’t always be easy to spot using only figures and charts. Sometimes you’ll need to dig a bit deeper to understand the root cause of the problem. For example, you could put forward some hypotheses with corrective actions to accept or reject.

For an accurate interpretation of the data, you’ll need to ask yourself the right questions:

1. Have the objectives been met?

2. Do any of the gaps I’ve noticed require intervention?

3. What are the potential causes of the gap?

4. Can we retain this objective?

5. Do we need to implement any additional actions?

6. Do we need to investigate further?

Over to You!

Background

As project manager, you are responsible for coordinating and monitoring the project KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which are the key data items needed to assess team performance and progress. You’re using Notion to track and manage the project.

Instructions

Your task is to examine each KPI on the dashboard that is flagged with an unsatisfactory result. Make sure you define the actions required for these KPIs in columns “Action 1” and “Action 2” so that the performance issues can be addressed and improved.

For example, let’s take the coding standards indicator:

1. Action 1: Organize a team training session on coding standards.

2. Action 2: Set up regular code reviews to ensure that standards are being met.

Ensure that your actions are realistic, pragmatic, and effective in improving the KPIs. Don’t forget, you’re the project manager, and the success of the project depends on how you respond to any issues.

Let’s Recap

• The management dashboard is a visual tool that brings together the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure project progress, support decision-making, make adjustments to activities, and assess any gaps between objectives and actual results.

• The dashboard is designed to help all project decision-makers with consistent decision-making. Although the project manager can take primary responsibility for the dashboard, they can ask data visualization specialists to help set it up.

• Before creating the dashboard, you need to define relevant objectives and KPIs, such as percentage of completion, deliverable quality, budget management, communication, risk management, and client satisfaction.

• It’s imperative to identify data sources, use appropriate data collection tools, and analyze the dashboard regularly to understand and address any gaps you may discover. 

Once your tracking tools are in place, you need to get ready to explore the application specifications in detail by creating diagrams and defining the test strategy. But before we do this, I suggest you test your knowledge in the quiz that follows to finish off this part of the course.