In a Large and Complex Project it is essential to make sense of the large amount of information that flows back to the Project Manager. Devising proper indicators and developing Visual Management Tools (to the extreme of setting up a Project War-Room) is an essential skill of the Project Control Manager. In our new White Paper 2017-09 ‘Why Custom Indicators and Visual Dashboards Are So Important for the Success of Large Complex Projects’ we describe the different steps that need to be taken in that respect.

At the end of the day, all the work done by the Project Control Manager aims at allowing the Project Manager and its management team take the right decisions at the right moment.

In a Project, the role of the Project Control Manager is quite similar to a cockpit’s engineer. The challenge of dealing with very large number of information sensors is also a reality for large Projects. Beyond the ‘usual’ Project indicators, the Project Control Manager must make sense of all the incoming information. What needs to be displayed will change with the Project phase and condition. During the Project course the Project Control Manager must also be ready to develop specific temporary, custom indicators to help the Project Manager take the right decisions.

At any given time, these custom indicators must be in limited number and aligned with the priorities of the Project Manager. They thus need to be carefully chosen and possibly renewed regularly. Some will be used for a large part of the Project duration, while some might be devised and used only for a few weeks during a critical phase.

Experience also shows that communicating with the Project team through visual indicators is a great way to foster continuous alignment. This has been recognized also by the early practitioners of Total Quality Management such as Toyota, to enhance teamwork: Kanban boards or Heijunka boxes are in fact visual dashboards on the workplace, to which the workers are to refer regularly.

A relatively new trend in the Project industry is to systematically implement ‘war-rooms’ where lots of indicators are displayed graphically on the walls. This room normally serves also as the main meeting room for the Project Management Team. This is not a new concept – again, the Toyota Way promotes the concept of ‘Obeya’, the “great room” of Lean Management where the management gathers to undertake a higher level of effectiveness in communication and decision-making.

Leveraging on new technology, modern war-rooms not only have static displays of visual dashboards. They should also provide data-mining tools and interface to allow for further data analysis.

Read our new White Paper 2017-09 ‘Why Custom Indicators and Visual Dashboards Are So Important for the Success of Large Complex Projects’ to understand better the power of custom indicators and dashboards for Large Complex Projects.

If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: http://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2017-09_Visual_Dashboards_Warrooms_v0.pdf