The visual indicators in Perfect Project help MSPs promptly recognize patterns and problems in projects
Visual indicators are an essential element of user interface design. Cities use signs and other cues to direct traffic. Cybersecurity software displays complex, time-sensitive data using heat maps, color gradients, and gauges. These indicators quickly draw your attention to metrics like threat level and response time. The color, shape, size, and position of symbols and icons in data science software allow data scientists to quickly process vast stores of information.
In project management, the Kanban board and timeline are both visual indicators. But when your project data is complex, you need more advanced imagery – like the signs, gauges, and heat maps used by cities and in data science and cybersecurity software – to stay on top of the urgent information in your project portfolio.
When managing a portfolio of projects, hunting for problems and manually updating tasks in a timeline, kanban board, or Gantt chart is simply too time-consuming. That’s why Perfect Project uses the Critical Path, and a proprietary visual indicator called the RPAX score, to display project data in a glanceable format.
Why visualization is important
Visual elements like charts, graphs, and gauges help humans understand massive amounts of information quickly. If the software you use translates the data you are trying to access into a visual representation, your brain can process it much more quickly than if you have to pour through a list, board, or timeline.
The human brain, according to research, can process an image in as little as 13 milliseconds. Our brains have evolved for eons to recognize patterns. We constantly look for patterns in our environment because this is how we learn. If you are driving in an unfamiliar city, for example, it is easier to find your way if you can identify a pattern or find a rule among the streets and signs.
When an artificial intelligence sorts the relevant information in a body of data into a visual pattern, your brain is able to glance at that image and understand what’s happening almost instantly. That is precisely what the AI in Perfect Project does. It turns vast amounts of ever-changing project data into the glanceable RPAX score and Critical Path.
The RPAX score
In traditional project management tools, you pour through tasks, schedules, dates, and plans to identify and solve problems. You are manually hunting for issues that will cause you to break a promise to a client, exceed a budget, or drop a ball. It feels like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Because, in a complex project, that’s what it is.
In Perfect Project, you glance at the RPAX score to find all the trouble at once. The AI in Perfect Project has scanned all the data – every deadline, task, duration, and deliverable – to calculate a score that tells you, in a glance, if your project is at risk.
This saves time. It can also save the project.
If your project is complex or you are managing a portfolio of them, problems are buried in a sea of data. Finding them manually takes more time than any human has for the task, especially since identifying issues can involve a great deal of math and probability. Processing data, complex calculations, and constant vigilance are where artificial intelligence shines. The intelligence inside Perfect Project relentlessly watches for change or errors, and constantly recalculates everything to keep that RPAX score fresh and up to date.
Clicking on that score drills into the data to take you directly to the problem and some ideas about how to fix it. If a calendar change causes a deadline to slip, for example, Perfect Project suggests other team members who can take over the work or tasks elsewhere in the project that could be completed faster.
The Critical Path View
When working on complex projects, it can be difficult to get your team and clients to understand why their tasks need to happen when your plan demands. Focused on their piece of the work, people are unable to imagine how missing today’s deliverable can create enormous problems for teams and work downstream.
A person ordering equipment, for example, might not believe that placing an order for a complex project with a completion date that is weeks away is as urgent as the needs of a project with a closer deadline. If that same person can see the entire project – with every step and the time each will take – on a path toward completion, they can better understand why accomplishing their part today – instead of next week – is essential to the project’s success. The Critical Path is the visual indicator that conveys this complex reality effectively.
An enormous amount of data goes into calculating the Critical Path, which is why most project managers don’t use it. The critical path in Perfect Project, though, is generated automatically by an internal intelligence that can do the complex calculations instantly. This means it can recalculate this complex visual indicator every time anything changes. This allows everyone working on the project to see – in real time – how their accomplishments and delays will affect the project’s ultimate outcome.
Allowing people to see this pattern will help you keep projects on track. And it will do it with much less communication. Instead of cajoling, meeting, and spelling out the reality that the project manager knows to be true, the Critical Path creates an easy-to-grasp pattern that every human brain can quickly comprehend.
Want to learn more about how the RPAX Score and Critical Path can keep your portfolio of projects running smoothly? Check out our project management resources for MSPs.
