managing multiple software projects [closed]

Question

we have an organization that has about 50 different software projects going on (about 90 developers). some big, some small. some are front to back solutions and some are building on top of existing solutions and technologies.

some of these projects are new initiative and some are incremental improvements over existing software that we built.

our senior management is looking for a sleek way to visualize all the projects going on including:

1. Size of effort in time and resources
2. ROI expected from the work
3. Indicate incremental improvement versus new initiative.

the reason is that we probably want to move resources around to ensure top ROI but not all developer are fungible depending on their skill set.

in my head, this results in some type of heatmap or dashboard, but i wanted to see if there are any recommend solution or tools out there that attack this area.

right now we just have spreadsheets listing out each project and resources and somehow it doesn't really give a good visualization of whats actually happening.

any suggestions?

Answer 1

Agilefant is an open-source tool that "brings together the perspectives of long-term product and release planning and project portfolio management", and is being actively developed. I would try the 2.0-alpha release (accessible via the Downloads page) for improved visualization tools, but you can also try the live demo to get the idea of what Agilefant can do.

Answer 2

A classic consultant's technique... I would start by plotting them on a 2x2 graph. Make the vertical axis the ROI, with high at the top, make the horizontal axis two partitions of incremental improvement on the left and new initiative on the right - and I bet there are some projects which are a bit of both, so maybe you have a continuum. Plot each project on those axes as a circle and make the area of the circle represent the number of man days.

Stuff in the top right is high return, new initiatives, stuff in the bottom left is low return maintenance/incremental improvements. If you do one chart for current resource deployment and another for planned resource deployment you'll get a strong feel for how you are spending your manpower.

There are many variations on this and you can choose what you want to plot where to best show your story. It is simple and powerful as a visual aid and you can get 90 circles on your chart without losing the woods for the trees.

HTH and good luck.