How Tableau visualization helps project management
Believe it or not. A live dashboard can significantly contribute to project management.
It’s common for project managers to manually calculate the completion percentage, track the status of all the to-do items, and monitor the spending. These tasks are time-consuming and troublesome. Not to mention that project managers need to make slides and charts to update the status to senior leaders.
Life is easier with a well-designed Tableau dashboard. Listed below are two dashboard examples for project management — Budget Management Dashboard and Task Management Dashboard.
Budget Management Dashboard
This Budget Management Dashboard (click to access the dashboard) is created based on dummy data to demonstrate how a project team can leverage this dashboard to track their budget spending and use it as a summary when reporting to the upper management team.
The dashboard covers features including below,
- Showed a warning message when the spending exceeds the budget.
- Displayed current status for committed payment, paid payment, and the total budget.
- Demonstrated payments (capital/ expense; committed/ paid) by Category, Region and Site.
- Connected all graphs together for users to play around and get the whole picture of the project easily. For example, by clicking Category 1, users can see how payments for Category 1 are allocated to each region in the Region graph.
Task Management Dashboard
This Task Management Dashboard (click to access the dashboard) is created based on dummy data to demonstrate how a project team can utilize Tableau to monitor project delivery.
The thermometer allows users to know the project completion rate by simply a glimpse. The Burn Down chart is another useful graph. The line shows how many tasks remained by date. In addition, by comparing the planned (blue) and the actual (red) situation, it’s easy for the project team to understand whether they are behind the schedule or not.
The two dashboards mentioned above just showcased how Tableau can automate the process of visualizing data. It’s not just a tool that generates fancy charts. Project managers can adopt the dashboard to monitor project delivery and spending. It’s not a tool for project managers to simply perform upper management, neither. When the whole project team — including executors, project managers, and senior leaders — can access the dashboard, it surely contributes to smooth and effective communication.
