MS-Project and the Deadline Dashboard

I’m not a huge fan of dashboards, particularly red-yellow-green types of dashboards. Too often, the oversimplify, providing a simplistic, un-nuanced and therefore low-value view of a situation.

In particular, I believe they’re a very poor tool for reporting up or out on a project or project portfolio, for reasons I’ve detailed in other posts.

However, if used in conjunction with rich data, a dashboard can provide an eye-catching way of spotting something going wrong. Sam Huffman presents a very neat way* of including a dashboard within Microsoft Project layouts, as shown in the reduced-size picture below.

It’s a bit tricky to set up, but Huffman walks you through the steps with lots of supporting pictures.

This is most useful to the project manager and sometimes the project team. I strongly recommend you not include it in project plans presented to management. It’s too easy to look at the pretty lights and think you understand more than you really do.

As a department manager, I never wanted to see working dashboards or other symbol-heavy reductions; I knew how easy it was to get caught up in these pseudo-facts. Also, I knew that teams learn to shade their work to ensure that something that’s either-yellow-or-red, for example, always shows up as yellow.

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*Updated with link 7:28AM PST January 14.