I knew that Fine Arts degree would come in useful

What distresses me most about modern project management in an agile context is our complete disregard for visualization.

We create a few pretty graphs and bar charts from various data points in the tracking system, hoping that some random red, green and yellow lines will cross at some arbitrary point, and call it good if they do and bad if they don’t.

Visualization of critical data points is… well… critical to being able to reason about a project in a meaningful way that doesn’t require us to interpret numbers and clouds of data points.

On almost every project where I do nothing but project management I dedicate about 5% of my daily work to creating and updating graphical representations of our project.

How many tasks done.

How many known tasks to go.

How many bugs are open.

How many we closed yesterday.

How many new bugs we opened yesterday.

People who are “in” (the office) that week.

People who are “out” (on vacation) that week.

Any data points that I can convey visually.

And then I post them prominently for others to see.