QEI Exec Project Management Software: Boxcharts
The traditional barchart (Gantt chart) displays one bar per line in the vertical direction. Although some packages (including QEI Exec!) can display multiple bars per line, even this format does not always provide a suitable means of displaying information in situations where one wishes to group tasks or activities together.
This extension to QEI Exec was originally co-developed by PCF and British Aerospace to display work assignments for engineering staff during aircraft manufacture at the Woodford plant (see Case Study).
The diagram above shows a typical boxchart. The horizontal axis displays a timescale much like a normal barchart, but in this example the vertical axis groups tasks by the resources assigned to them. This means that a single task may appear more than once on the chart if it has multiple resources assigned to it - as has happened with the task coloured yellow in this case. The height of each box also indicates the amount of the resource that has been assigned. The bottom of the chart is displaying a histogram indicating the total resource load.
In addition to all the normal features available in a QEI barchart, a boxchart offers:
- grouping of tasks into zones based on
- task attributes - e.g. work package, location code.
- resource attributes - e.g. resource, resource group
- full control over the style and amount of data presented
- dynamically sized boxes based on resource loadings
Note once again that this is an interactive system, not merely a chart produced by postprocessing project data. Users can edit tasks or change resource assignments, and the histograms will dynamically recalculate. In addition, since a boxchart is a fully integrated component of QEI Exec, any other views of the data being edited will also update to reflect the changes.
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