The design journey: project management dashboard

A Project Manager wears many hats, but three aspects of the job which are integral in the successful and timely delivery of a project is: the ability to manage a team, update stakeholders and conducting ongoing assessment of the health of the project.

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words this is also true for data. Which is why we developed the Project Management Dashboard, we wanted something to easily track and report the progress of our projects. The Project Management Dashboard continually updates enabling anyone to review the status of the project and determine what actions need to be taken at any time.

As big fans of the Power Platform, we created a Project Management list in SharePoint with the tasks, estimates and team members. As the project progresses, the person accountable updates the list item with the actual hours and adds any roadblocks or issues they run into.

We created a third Power BI dashboard which outputs the status reports every week. These reports would be reviewed in a weekly project update meetings to ensure we were on track.

We then opted to take it a step further to create a programme report which showed a summary of the status of project and each person involved in project.

We wanted to be able to easily identify the current status of scope and time in the report so assigned values to each. These values would be then be represented using the traffic light system: red, green or yellow.

It was easy to see that this tool would be valuable for most companies, so we started the journey to convert it into a product. Our PMO team was consulted, and we brought in our in-house graphic designers to build a dashboard that saved us time and looked great.