Over the years, visual project management emerged as a functional alternative to text-based project management. That’s because people naturally understand visuals better than numbers and text.
These tools allow project managers, stakeholders, and team members to visually analyze data and have a more graphic representation of the state of their projects.
With a visual project management tool, teammates can visualize processes, better understand roles, and see how each role affects the others. It also helps team members anticipate a project timeline.
Teamwork is the most important benefit of visual project management. When team members can easily see and interpret information, it leads to greater collaboration, which is important for timely completion.
Types of Visual Management Views
There are different types of representation of visual project management. Common examples include Gantt charts and roadmaps, Kanban boards, Scrum boards, and Graphs.
Kanban boards are visual systems for organizing workflows. These boards are designed to prevent bottlenecks and encourage incremental improvements. This kind of visual task management also helps to maximize available resources.
With Scrum boards, projects are organized using columns and cards. Typically, the boards operate a “pull system,” where completed tasks are removed, leaving a space on the display. Scrum boards are ideal for short-term projects.
A Gantt chart allows users to visualize an entire project at a glance. This means users can get visuals of the project’s total scope and individual tasks in a project. They can also see start dates, end dates, and more.
However, tasks on a Gantt chart must not be too much, or else the chart can become clumsy and difficult to comprehend.
Tools for Visual Project Management
Here are five visual project management tools that can benefit your work. You should choose visual project management tools based on the length and scope of the project.
1. Trello
Trello is a visual tool that empowers teams to manage any type of project planning, workflow, or task management and tracking.
The tool is very simple, flexible, yet powerful. It offers several features that make project management fun and can be used to organize multiple projects.
With its boards, lists, and cards, you can easily understand who’s doing what and what needs to get done during the project planning process.
Trello also allows you to keep all the information your team needs organized and in one place. With this tool, you can assign tasks to members, add due dates, comment, and do so much more. It is an easy-to-use project management app.
2. Kissflow Project
Kissflow Project is a cloud-based collaborative visual project management tool. It is designed to manage tasks, create project plans, generate automatic deadline reminders, share files, and so much more – all from within a single platform.
Kissflow Project uniquely uses Kanban boards to add divisions for sections of its columns. The sections include “In progress,” “on hold,” and “done.” This way, Kanban boards in Kissflow Project are not as clumsy as in other apps since there are only a few columns.
3. Asana
Asana is an online mobile application designed to help teams better organize, track, and manage multiple projects. It is also an excellent collaboration tool with lots of flexibility and vast capabilities.
Asana allows users to create templates for use on similar projects in the future. This saves plenty of time and effort.
The tool is a great choice for businesses of all sizes but might not be the best pick for individual projects.
Asana combines Gantt charts, calendars, and Kanban boards to provide the best visualization for even the most complex projects.
4. Wrike
Wrike is a digital work management tool that allows users to track and coordinate projects. While it features a simple user interface, it offers enough depth, making for an overall great user experience.
The tool provides lots of visualization for projects with features like Gantt charts, calendars, and Kanban boards.
Wrike is a flexible platform that lets users decide how their projects should be visualized for effective management. It also allows users to prioritize more important tasks over the others and easily integrates with external applications for optimum performance.
5. Zoho Sprints
Although not ideal for very large projects, Zoho Sprints is an agile project management tool that features Scrum boards. It can integrate with Zoho Projects that feature Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and other customizable functions.
Zoho Sprints have lots of integrations and allow you to break your work into user stories. You can easily track the progress of your sprints in the Scrum board and sprint dashboard. This gives you a detailed view on how your progress.
Zoho Sprints also offers better team collaboration, allowing team members to work together from anywhere.
Benefits of Visual Project Management
Some of the benefits of visual management tools include:
1. Saves Time
Visual representation makes data interpretation easier. Time spent looking for data on spreadsheets can be easily saved with visual management tools.
Working with manual spreadsheets is a stressful way of getting work done on any project, whether you’re trying to input or extract data. Apart from being prone to mistakes, it is time-consuming.
2. Easier to Monitor
Using visual management tools, such as Kanban boards and Gantt charts, makes visual tracking of tasks possible.
At a glance, you can see how the team is doing and where the work is lagging. With visual representation, you can identify challenges before they become problematic and work on correcting them.
3. Ease of Collaboration
Perhaps the greatest advantage of visual management tools is the ease of team communication and collaboration with team members.
Without having to communicate one-on-one, you can share information with team members and ensure collaboration with all the members. This way, members are not distracted or overwhelmed with too much information.
4. Simplicity
Visual project management tools simplify the process of getting information and managing projects. You can get information easily and conveniently with visual tools, regardless of how complicated a project is.
Since information delivery is streamlined, you can easily track progress to stay in line with your project schedule. Otherwise, you would have to comb through so much information just to understand your various processes.
With simplicity also come speed, convenience, clarity, and transparency.
