Working With Visuals

Usually, the objective when creating a visual is to create a good representation of the project plan on a single page. In order to achieve this a number of design decision need to be made. Here are some considerations on how to approach this.

1. What needs to be in the visual to ensure it represents what you need it to. For example if you have a full project plan including lots of activities and milestones for stage gates or dependencies which drive the dates of other activities, then you may not need to include those in the visual itself.

2. How many swimlanes do you need? Sometimes one may be enough, and if you go above five, trying to keep the visual on one page and not look really cluttered will be tricky. If your plan is very structured with top level activities representing either phases or functionally related activities then you may want a swimlane for each Phase, or maybe a swimlane for two phases. For a software development, for example, you may wish to have Discovery and Design in the same swimlane, and Build and Test in the same swimlane.

3. How much granularity do you need? For a very complex plan with many levels, you are probably going to want to include high level summary activities rather than lower level tasks. A good approach is to start with very high level activities and then add some more detail once you have something. Starting with too much detail makes it more difficult to adjust later.