The combination of these two features allows users to dramatically expand the size of the bubble chart area while being able to still identify the bubbles without a legend by using the bubble chart labels.

The chart legend can be toggled on and off using a button on the front of the bubble chart form, and it can also be set as a default preference.

Bubble Chart Pro 4.3 is a free upgrade to all our current licensed Bubble Chart Pro customers. If you’re not a current user, click here now to try it for free!

In the example shown here, you can see how fading the background slightly helps the bubbles stand-out more from the image.

Source: NPR

“The thing that astonishes me when I talk to businesspeople in the context of decision analysis is that you have an organization that’s making lots of decisions and they’re not keeping track. They’re not trying to learn from their own mistakes; they’re not investing the smallest amount in trying to actually figure out what they’ve done wrong. And that’s not an accident: They don’t want to know.

So there is a lot of curiosity, and I get invited to give lots of talks. But the idea that you might want to appoint somebody to keep statistics on the decisions that you made and a few years later evaluate the biases, the errors, the forecasts that were wrong, the factors that were misjudged, in order to make the process more rational — they won’t want to do it.”

I have noticed that many businesses employ processes and methods in Project Portfolio Management that are so subjective and qualitative that they couldn’t figure out what they’d done wrong, even if they wanted to.

Why?

Because they fail to accurately forecast the key performance indicators such as costs, risks, and rewards at the beginning of their project selection processes and then track the actual performance against them. Instead, they use “systems” to prioritize projects and select portfolios such as putting them in and pulling them out of “buckets” or trying to create some mythical “balance,” or somehow magically aligning them to “strategy” or “business outcome.” These types of systems can have great “feel good” emotional appeal, but they can’t give measurably “wrong” or “right” results because they can’t be benchmarked or tested against actual portfolio results.

Then managers wonder why so many portfolios have huge cost overruns, fail to meet timelines, over-stretch their resources, or simply fail to meet expectations.

Yet there are all kinds of excuses as to why not to use a robust quantitative modeling system such as:

• Our organization isn’t mature enough.
• Good computer models aren’t perfect.
• Key performance indicators can’t be estimated precisely.
• Quantitative models are complex.
• There are things we can’t know about our projects.

Each one of these is true. And each one can be solved rather easily, but, like learning any valuable and important new skill, it can take training,  time, and the willingness to try and be wrong in order to improve.

I think Kahneman may be right. Maybe business people don’t want to do it because they don’t want to know what they are doing wrong.

What do you think?

One excellent way to get started with a quantitative project portfolio management system is with Bubble Chart Pro OPTIMAL. Bubble Chart Pro OPTIMAL comes with robust easy-to-use SMART project prioritization and optimization systems built-in, all for less than $250.

Click here to download you free demo version now!

The first most requested feature was the capability to automatically label the bubbles in bubble charts by displaying the project names on top of the bubbles. You can do this in Bubble Chart Pro 4 by checking the [Display Bubble Name] checkbox in the preference form.

The second most requested feature was the capability to add custom graphics and pictures to the backgrounds of bubble charts and bar charts. In Bubble Chart Pro 4.0, you can import individual pictures and save them in a library. You can then easily select the pictures that you want to use as backgrounds for your charts. This allows you to add graphical backgrounds such as photographs, maps, textures, corporate logos, etc. You can even import a picture of a different chart and arrange the bubbles on top of it.

The third most requested feature was the capability of selecting bubbles to blink on-and-off in the chart display. This is a really easy and dramatic way to quickly see how one project or a group of projects is located on a chart in different views. You can toggle the blinking on or off by clicking a button on the front of the bubble chart form. Also, you can change the blinking speed by setting it using a slider in the preference form.

Bubble Chart Pro 4 is a free upgrade to all our current licensed Bubble Chart Pro customers. If you’re not a current user, click here now to try it for free!

The economists who used just the numbers alone made the worst predictions. The economists who used the data and the graphs did a bit better. But…

“The economists who were shown only the graphs and none of the numerical results, meanwhile, actually got most of the answers right, or close to right.”

This type of study illustrates why Bubble Chart Pro™ can be so powerful in analyzing business data. Instead of trying to make sense of multiple rows of numbers or using 2-dimensional charts, bubble charts show you 3-dimensions of data visually so relationships become instantly obvious. Couple bubble charts with the SMART prioritizer and the optimizer like you get in Bubble Chart Pro™ OPTIMAL, and you have an extraordinary tool for analyzing and visualizing your business data.

Click here to try Bubble Chart Pro OPTIMAL today!

First, in Bubble Chart Pro™ PLUS and Bubble Chart Pro™ OPTIMAL, you can now open your project portfolios in a Project Portfolio Dashboard.

The Dashboard let’s you view and compare multiple bubble and bar charts in a single form as well as modify your data, prioritize your projects, and run optimizations (in the OPTIMAL edition). You can also see the distribution of your data for individual projects in a pie chart by simply clicking on a project row.

Second, now you can set full or partial columns of cells to equation results. For example, if you wanted to add Column A and Column B together and display the results in Column C, you would select Column C in the “Modify Selection” form and set the result to “A +B.”

This new feature supports parentheses, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction, and you write the equations as you would in Microsoft Excel® and other common spreadsheet programs. The equation editor available in all Bubble Chart Pro™ editions.

Learn how to download your free trial version of Bubble Chart Pro™ by clicking here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Why bar charts?

Where bubble charts are excellent at displaying the relationships of projects with each other in dimensions of their attributes, such as cost, reward, and risk, our new bar charts let you compare the relative relationships of attributes among all projects. This is extremely useful when you’re performing a prioritization using the SMART prioritizer as you can now quickly see the contribution of each attribute to the total value score for each project.

You can read more about using the new bar chart module in project prioritization by clicking here.

You can read about all the new feature in Bubble Chart Pro™ 3 by clicking here.

You can learn how to download a free trial by clicking here.

Colleges are ranked in the legend by size of endowment.

“As tuition costs continue to mount at universities across the nation, some colleges are sitting on mountains of cash.
And while some of that cash goes to regular campus operations or scholarships for students with financial need, many schools don’t really use it at all, investing the money to fund big future projects. And sometimes, when the economy tanks, the money simply gets lost in the market.”

Source: The 10 Richest Colleges in America