Heat Map Solutions: Project Portfolio Management
Overview | How It Works | Communicate Effectively | Business Benefits | Next Steps

Increase Project Visibility to Reduce Risk, Increase Return, Build Confidence

Heat Map Explorer is an interactive visual analysis and reporting solution for project portfolio management. It provides project managers, executives, and internal and external stakeholders strikingly improved visibility into project performance data, empowering them to answer tomorrow's critical questions.

The result is to transform volumes of project performance detail into actionable insights that help keep project results aligned with business goals.

  • Reduce Risk
    Recognize and respond to critical problems and trends early.

  • Maximize Value
    Ensure that attention and resources go where they bring the best return.

  • Enhance Impact
    Build confidence among stakeholders through faster and more effective communication.

Regardless what systems you use for project portfolio management, Heat Map Explorer dramatically improves visibility into the results, ensuring that your organization gains maximum ROI from the financial and human resources that your organization devotes to project-based work.

Download a trial of the desktop version to work with your own data, try the web-based version preloaded with sample data, or explore the Heat Map Explorer product family.

How Heat Map Visual Analysis Works

Heat map visual analysis for project portfolio management enables you to:

  • Rapidly identify troubled projects, before they're out of control

  • Discover resource allocation problems and opportunities

  • Reveal patterns and relationships that indicate critical trends

Heat maps allow you to view an entire portfolio of hundreds or more projects and to grasp in seconds which projects are at risk, how important they are, and how they compare to other, related projects. Heat maps use size, color and grouping to visually convey quantitative and other information so that even complex relationships and large volumes of information can be understood rapidly.

Keying size and color to critical measures like total budgeted cost and earned value, and grouping projects according to categories like project type, location, or manager, heat maps offer a powerful tool that enables more people to answer unanticipated questions far more effectively than they ever could using only standard dashboards, reports and graphs.

Ungrouped Heat Map
Click to enlarge or try it live.

In the heat map at right, each box represents a single project, with size tied to budgeted cost, and color keyed to a performance index ranging from green (on-track) to red (problematic performance).

Simple reports can tell you what projects are in trouble, but lack the broader context. Yet even a simple heat map visual analysis, like that at right, allows you to rapidly identify hot spot problems and to see how those problems relate to the rest of the context - to see the big picture and vital details all at once in a single view.

Heat maps let you easily interact with data to push beyond simplistic on-track/off-track information and to discover the underlying issues and trends that have business impact.

Grouped Heat Map
Click to enlarge or try it live.

For example, a wealth of information is revealed by grouping project status data by key categories, such as the responsible project manager and location of the project. Even a brief review of the heat map at right clearly reveals three critical issues:

  • The manager in the lower right is in trouble;

  • The top left manager is overloaded, with some projects approaching critical status;

  • There is a pattern of trouble with Atlanta-based projects for the manager at lower left.

Maximum Impact: Communicating Effectively

Information can only be truly valuable when it reaches those able to understand and act on it. The business impact of heat maps on project portfolio management goes beyond their analytical value: heat maps are powerful communication tools as well.

Picture of e-mail communication Picture of presentation Picture of web communication
Via e-mail Via presentations Via the web

Heat Map Explorer enables effective communication in several ways.

  • Visual representations of patterns, trends and anomalies are often dramatically clearer and more effective than using words or numbers.

  • Heat Map Explorer's desktop editions allow heat maps and heat map images to be pasted into documents or presentations, and even allow a fully interactive heat map to be e-mailed directly from within the visual analysis tool.

  • Heat Map Explorer's Web Viewer and Enterprise editions deliver fully interactive heat maps anywhere via the web.

Our on-demand webinar demonstrates how to use heat maps to extract and communicate critical project portfolio management information, or you can try it yourself using our live web-based heat maps.

Business Benefits

When business performance depends on effectively managing a portfolio of projects, the Heat Map Explorer product family enables you to:

  • Improve business agility through quicker analysis, better decisions and more effective communication.

  • Align the implementation of projects with key business strategy and goals.

  • Provide visibility into project portfolio performance for key stakeholders and even clients.

  • Reduce risk by discovering key trends before they can lead to major project trouble.

  • Improve allocation of resources to ensure that they are flowing to projects that both need them and contribute most to business goals.

  • Improve the balance of projects across all dimensions.

Next Steps