Visual Project Management – The Future of Project Management

Being a Project Manager, How many of you like long – text based project management documents to manage your project? How often do you use and update those lengthy textual documents?

If you do like, Please IGNORE this post! Otherwise, continue reading this post on Visual Project Management – The Future of Project Management.

Project Manager is accountable for delivering desired UNIQUE product, result or services for which the project was undertaken which is known as “Product Scope”, however, in order to manage product scope, schedule, cost and quality, Project Manager need to prepare and/or update Project Management Plan which contains various planning documents and status reports to communicate right information to stakeholders which is known as “Project Scope”.

This traditional project management approach should be altered in current dynamic, frequently changing business environment where various factors like market demand, competition, regulatory compliance and technology advancement forces project manager to frequently update project management documents to accommodate revised business need.  This leads to many pain points for Project Managers, for example,

–          Difficulty in updating and using lengthy textual project management documents

–          Difficultly in communicating right information to right stakeholder at right time

–          Global work environment, frequent travel impact peoples’ interest in reading lengthy time consuming documents

–          Difficulty in getting ‘Bigger Picture’ of project, dependencies and intended outcome.

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Visual Project Management addresses above pain points and makes life easier for Project Managers!

I would define Visual Project Management as,

                “Use of Visualization techniques in Project Management! “, where Visualization means a technique / method to create an image/picture, animation to capture large and complex data into single page!

A well-known phrase says “A Picture is worth a thousand words”!

Visual Project Management follows this well-known saying and help Project Managers in achieving following key benefits,

•  Ease of Communication – via Visual Communication, a most effective communication method to communicate idea / message to stakeholders by registering an image in their mind.

Now-a-days, an Interactive Information Design through animation enables Project Manager to communicate any complex message into quick, simple and easy way.

• Productivity improvement – via better, efficient and effective planning documents which mostly fits in single page.
• Ability to quickly modify project management documents to accommodate frequently changing business needs because of visual nature of documents and that too in single page!

To start with, I would like to share following Visual Project Charter sample for your further reference;

Project Charter Sample

I hope, this post will help you shifting Project Management paradigm from Traditional project Management to Visual Project Management track.

The journey has begun… wait and watch for my future posts on Visual Project Management.