This is the first installment of Chart Busters.
Chart busters is a new series of posts on PHD and Jon Peltier’s blog. We take turns to exterminate bad charts and associated evils. Although our proton packs are still not perfect, together we are confident of tackling most ghosts trapped in bad charts.
In this installment we take a look at Asset Allocation Chart that looks like it is hexed.
The bad chart
Our reader DMurphy submitted a poorly made asset allocation chart,
If you are looking for an early contender, here’s one which came in to my wife from her Pension company this week showing (or at least attempting to show) the make-up of her investments.
The above image is an excel reconstruction of even sadder looking chart.
What is wrong with it?
- Poor chart selection: Pie charts are good for 3-4 data elements. When we need to present 10 or so items, it is better to use a bar chart or a line chart.
- Not grouping and sorting the information: In the first chart which is displaying Asset Allocation is made from data that has 3 different series – Bonds, Equities and Other. But the chart shows everything in the same way, thus making it difficult to understand how assets are allocated to various classes of investment. Also, the data is not sorted in any meaningful order.
- Poor use of labels: The labels A,B,C … are non descriptive. They are also repeated on the other chart although they mean different things.
The Chart Busters’ Fix
Thanks to guest parachartanalyst Joe Mako, who contributed this fix:
I have taken Joe’s ideas and slightly modified them to create the below chart
Click here to download the above fix in excel and see it yourself.
Added Later: Readers Submitted Fixes
Submitted by Paulo Cesar Semblano da Costa:
- I think Paulo’s version manages to reduce chart clutter a bit more. Very good effort.
- You can download this version from here.
Submitted by Jeff Wier
- Jeff’s version is very good. Again, like Paulo, he managed to reduce the chart clutter bit more and made it look very slick.
- You can download this version from here.
What we have learned?
- Zombies are scary, even when they are looking like donuts.
- Always try to sort the data in some meaningful order before pushing it to charts
- Use a variation of panel chart or color the series sensibly to bring out key differences
- Try to avoid generic labels like 1,2,3 or A,B,C and instead use the actual values and category names
How would you have tackled this?
We dont know how open source the ghost busters were. But Chart Busters are 100% open source. Share your ideas and suggestions for improving this scary little chart to something that makes sense.
When ya gonna call…?
Consult chartbusters today. Send us your bad charts. All you have to do is fill out this google form.
Arent ya gonna read these… ?
What to do no when no one likes your pie | Non sucky excel chart templates
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.