Friday, April 10, 2015

Project Management Dashboard

Executive Summary for Project Dashboard
The Project Dashboard project was conceived through discussion with Michael Takahashi, a Project Manager at SRI International, a "nonprofit, independent research center serving government and industry" whose research has led to such products as the computer mouse, medical ultrasound, and cancer drugs[1]. SRI has 2,100 employees, generating $540 million in annual revenue. Michael's role within SRI is to oversee the execution of several projects simultaneously. As such, he keeps a close eye on things like budgets, costs, and deadlines. As you might guess, he is a very busy man.
The problem that needed to be solved was that each week Michael would have to access the "DSS Homepage" through a web browser and click through to each project separately to check on the status of each project through several key metrics scattered throughout mounds of irrelevant statistics. This painstaking process takes considerable time and can be prone to user error (many clicks required). So, the Project Dashboard spreadsheet project was designed to access the site for Michael and pull down relevant data for each project and neatly arrange them in a dashboard.
The Project Dashboard contains a few different elements. First, the dashboard is present on the "Dashboard" sheet, where the user can read instructions, select if charts should be created for the latest data (using check boxes and a combo box), and visually see the data for each project, with data highlighted to warn the user of any alerting signs in the information. It's on the dashboard that the user clicks a button to execute the actions of collecting and displaying the latest data.
Second, the "MyProjects" sheet is simply a place for the user to list the projects that he/she cares about. The user has the option here to record a description to accompany each project.
Third, the "charts" sheet displays the resulting charts that the user has selected to generate for the latest data. Pie charts and/or column charts can be created to display break down of cost types and/or comparison of budget spent vs. total budget for each project, respectively.
Lastly, there is a "hidden" sheet that is, shockingly, hidden from the user's view. This sheet's only purpose is to act as a place for data from the Web to be imported and searched through.




[1] SRI International, Accessed April 6, 2015. http://www.sri.com/about

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