Saurav Khandelwal
Dec 11th, 2012
We have all heard that picture speaks a thousand words but when it comes to project/program reports we still don’t strongly believe in this saying. Steering committee meetings are inundated with numbers and short slide deck which takes a lot of time to explain and after spending so much time to understand them, focus moves to problem rather than solution. Hence I would like to reiterate how quickly a picture can communicate the right message.
In all project/program status meetings, one of the deliverable is project issue and risk summary. In most cases it can be a multi-dimensional summary. Management is primarily concerned about the business impact, effort required, action taken and criticality. Presenting this data in an intelligent format can highlight the issues that require most attention quickly. Here is where we can use impact/criticality matrix.
Impact/criticality matrix is a 4 quadrant matrix with business impact on the vertical axis and criticality (time to implement) on horizontal axis. Effort requirement is the depicted by the size of the bubble. Color coding of the bubbles depict the defect stage. A sample matrix is shown below:
Image may be NSFW.
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Above matrix provide a quick view to management as they can pinpoint to exactly where they want to concentrate on. It provides the multi-dimensional view in a single intuitive picture. This matrix has won me some praises and I am sure it would do that for you too.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
