Project Management (Designing Dashboards): Report Analysis and Metrics

This report addresses the design of project management dashboards, specifically focusing on the "portfolio resource management dashboard." It identifies the necessary materials, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) required for effective project control and monitoring. The report emphasizes the importance of these dashboards for managing capital projects within an organization's Project Management Office (PMO). It discusses critical metrics such as time, cost, resources, scope, quality, and action items. Key KPIs, including Return on Investment (ROI), Cost Performance Index (CPI), Schedule Performance Indicator (SPI), and resource capacity, are also analyzed. The report suggests that dashboards should provide a program overview, including budgets, teams, and project summaries, as well as drill-down capabilities for individual projects. The report highlights the limitations of project management tools without the application of KPIs to measure success. The report references several academic sources that support the discussion and provides a detailed analysis of the topic.

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Project Management
(Designing dashboards)
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author Note

1PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Identification of the type of materials, necessary metrics, and KPI in the
“portfolio resource management dashboard” for better control and monitoring:
The PMO of an organisation is needed to manage the capital projects. For this, a formal
procedure regarding how the dashboards are designed is developed. The following narrative is
established to recognise the kind of materials, required metrics and the KPI that are needed to be
incorporated.
The companies have been identifying the necessities to develop the project selection
decisions and better management of the project portfolios. The consulting organisations and software
vendors have been running before to deliver various tools for the tasks. Maximum of the related
products have been marketed as tools for the PPM or Project Portfolio Management (Martinelli &
Milosevic, 2016). However, they are also described as the tools for project prioritisation, portfolio
analysis, capital efficiency enterprise project management, capital allocation, asset management,
multi-project management and few another set of same terms. The primary target industries and
areas of applications are the features emphasised by the suppliers, structural characteristics like the
suite, provider location and the delivery modes like SaaS, onsite, web-based and desktop.
While all the projects consist of different criteria regarding success, still some of the critical
metrics are needed to be considered. The first one is the time that includes start data, end data,
variance, the percentage of the project started on time. Then there is the cost. This consists of the
baseline cost, budget cost, and actual cost and so on. The next one is the resources that include the
budget work, baseline work, practical work and so on (Kerzner, 2017). Then there is the scope. This
consists of the percentage of the project milestones gained, unresolved project change requests,
deliverable functionalities and much more. Further, the quality is needed to be considered. This

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includes the number of defects every month, load testing, application failures and much more.
Lastly, the action items are found. This consists of the resolution plans, critical project risks, risk
descriptions, risk symptoms, project issues, risk owners and risk impacts.
There have been significant KPI’s that are needed to be considered here. The first one is the
ROI or Return on Investment. It is the metric used to gauge the Profitability of the Investment. Then
there is the CPI that shows how the project funds are used. Next one is the SPI or Schedule
Performance Indicator that states how the project schedule is executed. The last one is the resource
capacity. This helps in better understanding of the limits of the project teams (Tolonen et al., 2015).
Thus the dashboard should communicate the program overview including the total budgets,
teams and projects. It must also include the summary of the projects including the budget versus
actual spend, the percentage of project progress, risks and tasks (Martinsuo, 2017). The individual
projects must be drilled down. This must incorporate the weekly plan, budget and task level
progress, critical issues and much more.
The information about the tools has been helpful for the screening at initial stage only. These
tools have been differing in various dimensions. Hence, it has been difficult to distinguish their
properties. It must be reminded that without utilising the KPIs, the companies are just tracking their
progress, without any benchmark to measure success.

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References:
Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and
monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.
Martinelli, R. J., & Milosevic, D. Z. (2016). Project management toolbox: tools and techniques for
the practicing project manager. John Wiley & Sons.
Martinsuo, M. (2017). HENRIIKKA PILPOLA EVALUATING AND MANAGING A PROCESS
DEVELOPMENT PROJECT PORTFOLIO.
Tolonen, A., Shahmarichatghieh, M., Harkonen, J., & Haapasalo, H. (2015). Product portfolio
management–Targets and key performance indicators for product portfolio renewal over life
cycle. International Journal of Production Economics, 170, 468-477.