A method to analyze visualizations in project management as boundary objects

Introduction

In project management different forms of visualizations are widely used e.g. gantt or PERT charts. A visualization can be defined as "The process of representing abstract business or scientific data as images that can aid in understanding the meaning of the data". In this article I will define a visualization by three minimal criteria :

1. Based on data. The purpose of a visualization is to communicate data, thus the data arrives from something that is not immediately visible.
2. The result must be readable and recognizable. A visualization must enable actors to learn something about the data.
3. Produce an image. Seemingly obvious a visualization must produce an image. In addition the visual must be the primary mean of communication, thus it’s not considered a visualization if the image is only a small part of the process.

How well a visualization ‘performs’ will in this article be explained as the ‘’quality’’ of the visualization, meaning that visualizations of higher quality performs better for a given situation and certain actors. Arguing that visualizations are of different quality begs the question: What constitutes a visualization of good quality (for the specific context)? I propose analyzing the quality of project management visualizations with boundary objects as the framework.