In Part I we looked at Social Networking, In Part II is an evaluation of  current visualizations.  The point has been made that we can use the enormous visual bandwidth to think.  Part III is going to add some more evaluations of current Visualizations and Conclude with an example of how we can use existing open tools to gather and visualize data for our projects.

Evaulations of Current Visualization Technology

First we all know there is no escape to Death and Taxes, so where does the US taxpayer money go?  If you don’t know than glance at the US Budget 2009. Or how about a real time map of US Stimulus Spending.

A 3 dimensional visualization of semantic language is the “Visual Thesaurus” .   This Thesaurus is novel because it allows us to locate words that are related in terms of closeness in 3-d, we can browse and explore them in a very intuitive fashion.  There are many other proprietary solutions  Tableau Software is very interesting.  It has the ability to combine data from many different sources for example spreadsheets and databases, the output is very nice.  You can publish interactive visualizations to the web.  This software shows great promise for the enterprise user due to the powerful combination.  You can download a free trial.

Adobe Flex is a development tool that enables developers to create clean Spring Graphs that are interactive.  There is also a JavaScript Visualization tool kit that can produce some Radial Graphs, Tree Maps, Hyperbolic Trees and Space Trees.   The visiual human project is a kind of spooky way to view a person.

The ubiquitous of visualization now is incredible we all know google earth, micosoft live earth, but how about NASA World Wind an incredible view of our solar system.  You can view the Mars Exploration images.

Musically, If you have an account with last.fm you can use this tool LastGraph to generate personal graph of your personal music history.

Some more links to Academic Reseaech on these concepts Online library of information visualization environments. Multi-V Hierarchical Clustering Explorer

One of my personal favorite places to spelunk around visually on the net is in The New York Times Visualization Lab.   A personal Favorite is The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 -2008.  Be prepared to devote some time to this one to be able to understand the simplicity and the beauty of such a visualization of data.  This is a fabulous way to explore information.Glen B Allerman discusses the uselfulness of visualizing complex data at Hearding Cats.   The beauty of it is; the intuitive grasp of the big picture with the ability to drill into the granularity without having to stop and think.  Some of the software behind NYT is IBM.  IBM Many Eyes is open for uploading datasets and sharing.  IBM Many Eyes is deceptively powerful.

EPIC systems has a very nice Trend Compass which is an interactive charting tool that can model the results as they change with a movie time line.  Gapminder exploits this to very nice effect, a very famous presentation at TED by Hans Rosling in 2006 exploited this type of data visualization motion.

Challenge to Project Managers

The problem is why with all of these beautiful ways to communicate do we still draw little pictures on napkins to manage our people on projects.

PMBOK Fourth Edition Power Interest Grid

This is a simple Visualization of Stakeholder Influence over time I created in Google docs in about 20 minutes to expand this static graph. Play with it change the colors and the size and add a Trail to G by clicking on it. Can you imagine using a static graph again?

There are a few places to go for inspiration.  Twitter has an open API or Application Programming Interface.  We are begining to see some interesting uses from the data sets. Malina will analyze your twitter messages.  This is an example of this Open Social Network Analysis.

There is some connection between Stakeholders.  Lets just say people.  My question is since we can’t measure motivation directly how can we manage motivation?  Especially, on distributed teams?

Social Network Analysis of Twitter User Easy to spot Network Nodes

The reason we want to measure this as Project Managers is Motivation.  I was particularly inspired by Kailash Awati and his vast knowledge and his ability to stimulate positive dialogs, one post in particular Managing participant motivation in knowledge management projects . The subject is Motivation.  If we can locate the Connectors “the people who link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together” we activate them as Salesmen.  If we can locate these connectors on our projects, we can also have a way to gauge interest.  We can also reduce the Complexity of Communication Channels on our projects to a discreet manageable set.

To restate from Part I This is related to recent information how Google cancels an incubation project.    The New York Times interview of  Jeff Hueber “When evaluating nascent projects, Google takes a hard look at interest – and in these cases, the interest simply wasn’t there… They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them.”

How can we do this?  I haven’t done it yet, but I am planning to do it.  I will use Google Forms, to create a form asking stakeholders to choose from a list of people that they know working on the project.  From that point I will mash it up using perhaps Javascript or IBM Many Eyes there are many open options to securely and easily create this communication managment artifact.

Conclusion

Success is related to connections;  the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the interest of the ideas of those connections.  If we can focus our management efforts on people who can connect and spread good information we can be more successful.  By using existing Visualization Technology on our Projects we can exploit the Enourmous bandwidth for Visualizing Peoples Influence on our Project.  The goals are to identify the Connectors, reduce the Communication Complexity, Measure the Interest and Motivate People.

Lets Visualize Peoples Influence on Projects by Robert Higgins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at blog.eastasiaportal.com.

Dynamic Interactive Visualizations

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) 'The eye, the window of the soul is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely sense and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature

In Part I of this series on visualizations we developed a compelling reason how success is related to our people.  To summarize:  Success is related to peoples connections to each other,  not only their  connections but the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the ownership of those connections.  In the second part we are going to  delve deeper into the current technology for visualizing information.

The purpose of this Part II blog post is to evaluate current visualization and interaction techniques.  Dynamic Interactive Visualization will allow us to abstract the information, effectively analyze data and make decisions.  This is an area that is undergoing tectonic shifts and new techniques are evolving every day.

PMBOK- Project Management Book Of Knowledge- Stakeholder Visualization

First, lets make sure we know who are we talking about.  We are talking about specific people on projects.   ‘A stakeholder is a person or group who has a direct interest and impact on the project outcome and determines whether the project is a success or not’ (Kathy Schwalbe, 2006) .  These people expect that something will be delivered.  Understanding what people want and communicating is the fundamentals of carrying out a project.  PMBOK recommends first we discover the people who can influence a project the most.  Second we classify these people according to their impact. Finally, we rate their interest.

As a starting point we can easily see Figure 10-4 that the Stakeholders who are in the Manage Closely group will require the most time.  For example H and F.  This 2-d image is static.  It can be easily generated on a napkin. The PMBOK guide does not detail how to measure Interest or Power so it has a subjective quality.  Experienced Project Mangers can often gauge interest similar to how Sales People can get a feel for their clients.  But Communicating this to other people, or across cultures may be more challenging.  The PMBOK  describe the  fundamental concept.  This process is as critical as it is universal; discover, classify and rate.

According to Figure 10-4 Visually we can easily see who we need to devote time and effort communicating with.   But we are looking to the future and how we can propel our projects forward naturally, by creating dynamic self illuminating visual information.  I argue that the best way to grasp and communicate about complicated complex project social knowledge, is by using the enormous visual bandwidth available to us.

An Analog tool to visualize stakeholders can be as simple as a chess, checkers set.  This type of very low tech item can be used for example in an environment in which computer skills are very limited.  Or it can also as a part of brainstorming team to capture what a group is thinking about.  The idea is that the pieces would be symbols of stakeholders, the board could be laid out similar to the “Figure 10-4″ from PMBOK 4 page 294.  The people can be elevated by placing the chess pieces on the checker pieces to create relativity.  String or colored pipe cleaner could be used to represent the connection between these people so that the critical nodes can be clearly identified.  An out of the box solution for sale commercially is Net-Map Tool Box.

How Infuential are your stakeholders?

This has great potential as part of a team building meeting and with a little creativity this can be imported with cameras both still and video to share and capture the knowledge.

Doctor Lynda Bourne of Stakeholder’s Circle has a Stakeholder specific visualization tool.    This Project Management Tool is specifically designed to identify, prioritize, map, engage and monitor people working on a project. From the literature it shows a type of visualization known as a  “Tree/Radar Map”.

More on academic research in this type of visualization is being done at University of Trier this visualization technique can be used ‘to represent weighted dynamic compound digraphs, which express a sequence of directed and weighted graphs where nodes correspond to leaves in a hierarchy’.

Time Radar Trees.

This is a technical description but we can easily visualize how the stakeholder nodes of influence can combine with actual activities and events in a project.  The inner Radar graph could be the project and the outer radars or thumbnails could be the stakeholders.  Personally for me, This type of visualization is eerily similar to what I imagine in my mind when I am cognating project social abstracts .  How can we consider the holistic project details and how the stakeholders influence ebbs and flows over time?  It is very difficult for us to express these abstract concepts using only words or pen and paper.

Academic  Research is rapidly evolving and new tools are being announced every day.  I have spent quite a bit of time exploring Doctor Tamara Munzer’s research.  This research is very detailed and informative.  Extreme granularity can be found in her Accordion Drawings.  This research is exploring how to visualize complex information for example `a system designed to support the comparison task for large trees of several hundred thousand nodes`.  This is fabulous research to process information and find the patterns and most likely could apply to the ultra complex mega projects.

Email Post Historical Visualizations

MIT has an interesting tool they used to view email and frequency over time, you can view some of the images from this project  Visualization of Social History.

Unfortunately it is not interactive, this is a concept that Project Managers could adapt for usage.

Stanford’s University Pat Hanrahan .  His presentation on Self Illuminating Phenomena is particularly inspiring.

Self Illuminating Phenomena Down Wash Voritces

I am a fan of a visual that can show our project status update dynamically based on some quantifiable metrics that describe our stakeholders expectations.   Ideally, we would like to have something in which we use all the tools available to us a project managers such as interviewing, modeling, analyzing relationships to let the Phenomena Self Illuminate.  As Doctor Hanrahan describes “A self-illustrating phenomenon is an image that is generated automatically as a result of an experiment. More importantly, it is an image that exposes the phenomenon behind the observation.”  This is precisely what we are looking for.

Part III to follow…..

People are connected to Project Success

Specifically, we need to understand the people that are connected and critical.   The problems we face is complexity.  Complicated projects span countries, time zones and cultures.  As Project Managers we need to set a goal to expand our knowledge.  We have to develop an artifact that dynamically communicates peoples hidden relationships in an explicit visual image. How can we do this?  We are going to explore.  First, where is mankind in terms of social networking? Second, visualizing social networks.  Finally, what would be the ideal solution for Project Managers.

"Rapid Growth in Soical Networks"

Why?  The BBC reports that each friend you have increases your earnings by 2%.  Perhaps, another reason is related to some research completed in December 2008.  ”Dynamic spread of happiness in a large network“.    The conclusion is not very surprising.  Peoples happiness depends on the happiness of whom they are connected to. Sounds pretty good!  An intangible quality of a successful project is the happiness of the people working on it.  If we look at the social aspects of game success in World of Warcraft, a study shows that it is not the quantity of people that determine winning.  Online winners are more likely related to their interconnectedness or closeness.

Cirlce of Friends

From the February 26th Economist Anthropological studies show that people can only mange about 150 friends.  Internal Facebook studies show that the most active stable groups are remarkably small.  Men will leave comments with about 17 people and women about 26.  We already know this we usually say something like “small circle of friends”.   Think about it…. If you are a man, are there 15 people you stay in close touch with?  For a women, do you have more than 25 close friends? Tight small groups of people are the most stable. Information spreads through our networks.  Some people think that the information will spread similar to a virus.  It will take some time to build and than once it reaches the tipping point it will accelerate until it peaks and then retrace.  The way these ideas spread are related to the type of person.  Gladwell describes 3 types of people.  “Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”  Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”  Salesmen are “persuaders”, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.” This is related to recent information how Google cancels an incubation project.  The New York Times interview of  Jeff Hueber “When evaluating nascent projects, Google takes a hard look at interest – and in these cases, the interest simply wasn’t there… They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them.” So we can see that.  Success is related to connections;  the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the interest of the ideas of those connections.  If we can focus our management efforts on people who can connect and spread good information we can be more successful. More to Follow……