Napoleon's March to Moscow and

NPD / R&D Portfolios

... Seeing is Believing

"Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data"

                                                                     - Edward R. Tufte, Prof. Yale University

                                            from "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" , Graphics Press, 1982  Chesire, CT

Did you ever hear of a French engineer by the name of Charles Joseph Minard?  In his obituary, he was referred to as a general inspector of bridges and roads.  Yet in 1859 he wanted to convey to his fellow Frenchmen the catastrophe of war.  In one graphic, Minard summarized the War of 1812 - Napoleon's march on Moscow.  It is just a simple picture (see below), but it tells the painful story of war in the 1800's.

Minard's graphic depicts Napoleon's Army's march from Paris to Moscow.  The width of the gray striped area is the size of the Army going to Moscow, placed over a geographic map.  Notice how the width of the band shrinks, especially when crossing rivers.  The solid black area/line reveals the size of  the Army returning to Paris. The bottom  line graph displays the temperatures encountered on the return. French casualties in Moscow were light.  Yet the Army was consumed in the march.  Only 10,000 of the original 432,000 survived. Click picture to enlarge

No doubt, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Here, it tells a complete story, revealing insights that are extraordinary.  As Yale University Professor Tufte, the renowned author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" puts it, good graphics are "powerful."  

And while NPD and R&D portfolio management may not be exactly Napoleon's march on Moscow (some might argue the case), good graphics are enormously important in our battles as well.  Indeed, when it comes to communicating to top management, I'd rather have one good graphic than a dozen data tables.  For NPD and R&D portfolio management, the most important chart to have is, without question, the bubble chart. Yet, as the poor manager that is asked to create them knows, the bubble chart is also the most difficult to generate and present.
 

Management can easily grasps the notion that, in bubble charts, each bubble represents a different project, and that properties of the bubbles reveal information about the projects.  At minimum: all bubbles have an X and Y position, all bubbles have a size (diameter), and all bubbles have a color. To make bubbles charts really communicate, it is often helpful to place labels or names next to the bubble, to show a "% slice" within the bubble, and to group project types by the shape of the bubble (circle, square, diamond, hexagon).  All of the properties, when taken together and through averages and distributions, convey a visual map of the portfolio.  Good bubble charts can quickly communicate information about individual projects and often can reveal profound insights about the portfolio as a whole.  Just like Minard's insightful chart, good bubble diagrams can be "powerful."

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Your Projects' March to Launch

Bubble charts that show the dynamics of a portfolio -- the changing state of the portfolio, much like Minard's diagram of the changing state of Napoleon's march -- can be extremely powerful.  But don't think you can create such charts easily with MS Excel charting function. You can't. However, it is possible to create them easily.  Adept's PortView(TM) charting software enables users to create bubble charts that reveal visually the changes happening in a portfolio.  The software gives users the capability to assign to the chart a property called "Projection Arrows."  Think of these as vectors showing the movement of the bubbles.  

Creating charts in PortView is extremely easy. Users simply assign a data field (from a database table) or a column name (from Excel) to each property: horizontal axis, vertical axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, fill style of bubble, shape of bubble, or slice within bubble.  The screen shot to the left shows a PortView window for assigning fields to the properties of the bubble. Here you see a means to assign the values within database fields or spreadsheet columns to the color of the bubbles, the full style of the bubbles, the shape of the bubbles, the size of the bubbles, the slice within the bubbles and the text label placed next to each bubble. Because the output is formatted as a Microsoft Windows MetaFile (vector graphic, not bitmap), users may place PortView 's graphic output into any MS Office application, including PowerPoint.  Indeed, the output is formatted to match the landscape shape of a PowerPoint slide. Therefore any chart produced by PortView may be stored or distributed as a slide in PowerPoint, and you may ungroup and edit anything in the chart just like you would any other PowerPoint slide.  If you know how to use Excel and PowerPoint, you already know how to use PortView.

The chart below displays projection arrows for projects moving through a stage-gate process.  PortView creates these vectors as lines between by two points: the X and Y center of the bubble and a second end-point, X' and Y'. Here, the beginning of the arrow (X', Y') is the position the project was in at the time of the previous portfolio review. For this chart, both the direction and the length of the projection arrow indicate how the project has progressed since the last portfolio review.  Sure, the data or metrics may be in a table someplace, but communicating true insights to management about the portfolio requires such dynamics to be seen.  Seeing is believing.

The bubble chart above was created in PortView simply by selecting the "Project Arrow" function, and then assigning the end-point X (horizontal) and Y (vertical) coordinates. In the data table, the column names are "Previous Stage-Gate Position" and "Previous Time to Market." These names were selected from the drop down menu created automatically by PortView when it reads the data table.