How to visualize program status

Daniel Barber

I have recently come on to a large program with many different projects all at various stages. My immediate goal is to consolidate this information and try to visualize it on a dashboard so that we can start to understand where each project is.

A general overview of our project life cycle:

Ideation (V0) —> R&D Planning (V1) —> Development (V2) —> Release (V3) —> Sustaining (V4)

The issue is that projects can live in more than one phase at a time. e.g. some HW R&D scoping (V1) can take place while we finalize the SW requirements (V0).

Ideally, I would like a stacked bar chart with three data sets. The y-axis shows the projects, the x-axis shows the project stages, and the z-axis shows percentage complete within each stage. But I have been unsuccessful in getting this to work. I have tried pulling this data from reports and sheets but I just cannot figure out how to represent it in a chart. I'm starting to realize a stacked chart might not be the best way to represent this data.

Any suggestions on how to get this to work or any better means to visualize this data?

ChristianFinke

@Daniel Barber

I believe the best alternative is a heat map matrix. List projects on the y-axis, phases on the x-axis, and use color gradients in each cell to show percentage complete. This approach offers a clear, quick view of each project’s status across phases, highlighting overlap and progress effectively.