Map-centric performance reports for capital construction projects have always been a requirement for executive stakeholders. Nevertheless, those stakeholders are not only interested in seeing a single dot for each project to show where it is located for which it is already known information for most of them. They are interested in knowing the boundaries of their projects and how each project relates to other projects in their portfolio that are either in progress, already completed, or even planned or considered for future implementation. For some capital project owners, their project types are not limited to buildings or parks but they might also include highways, roads, metros, service tunnels, and other types of what is known as linear projects. This is another reason why map visuals that show projects as dots are of no use to those stakeholders.Using Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb as the trusted platform to provide a real-time single version of the truth projects performance information coupled with an interactive business intelligence and data visualization tool like MS Power BI this challenge can be addressed. With the many types of visuals that can be used in MS Power BI to visualize and analyze the projects’ performance data captured in PMWeb, there will be a requirement to use the map visual from “Icon Map” which is a custom visual that allows showing the boundaries of all project types including those of linear projects. This requires providing the boundary geospatial points for all buildings and linear projects to identify the shape of those projects.
The boundaries of each project regardless of the project type will be captured in the PMWeb project module where each project gets added and defined. Using PMWeb additional user fields option, two main fields with the option of two additional fields will be created. The first is called WKT which is the abbreviation for “Well-Known Text Representation of Geometry” which details how each project boundary will be represented on the map-centric dashboard. Those could be either Point, Polygon, Line String, MultiPoint, Multi Polygon, Multi Line String, or Geometry Collection.
An example of a possible value will be “POLYGON ((54.36331801052588 24.452079101585895, 54.36371977830723 24.451661075463416, 54.3635978874327 24.451562893028605, 54.363523145121576 24.45150269444113, 54.36311294741023 24.451929805936444, 54.36326098926911 24.45204894453648, 54.363269515160816 24.452040077815266, 54.36331801052588 24.452079101585895))”. The second user-defined field will be used for the object color to be displayed on the map-centric dashboard. The value for this field will be based on the RGB Color Codes Chart for which a Red Color will have the code “#F90E25”. In addition, two optional fields for Destination Latitude and Destination Longitude will be also created. Those two fields along with Latitude and Longitude fields available by default in the PMWeb project template will be used if the project was a straight line. It should be also noted that using the Line String option for the WKT field will also serve the same requirement.
The project’s definition data and other performance data from the business processes needed by the stakeholders for the performance reports will be extracted, transferred, and loaded from PMWeb to MS Power BI. Queries will be used to extract the required data fields for the PMWeb MS SQL database to create the required datasets. MS Power BI will automatically link those datasets to each other depending on the data fields that are common to those datasets. This data will become the basis for creating the data models that will become the basis for the shared performance information.
This could also include creating new calculated measures using the extracted data fields. MS Power BI also setting the option on how the data extracted will be refreshed. There is the option of real-time data as well as the option to refresh the data on selected time intervals during the day.
