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A Picture Is Worth How Many Words?
As some of you may know, my company has this assessment program that it sells. One of the features is a very robust graphing solution. The question is, just really what do people get out of graphs, anyway? I mean, I had a heckuva fun time programming all that neat stuff, but does a picture like this make any sense to you? When dealing with multi-dimensional data, some of these charts are great if you want to confuse the heck out of people, but not so good if you're trying to explain something: a little goes a long way.
What I've been doing is running a process status report, which gives me the good, bad, and the ugly about process quality. Then I take the best and worst and try to make a simple graph out of that.
Even then, I've found that a bar graph works best in situations like this. My friend Bernie Clark at Unified Process Group was very kind during the early stages of the MAT creation. I was having a hoot blasting all kinds of 3-dimensional reports and charts from the tool, but he wisely pointed out that less is always better when dealing with large amounts of information. The more we can process it first, the more valuable the results are. Thanks Bernie!
So is there a place for a 3-dimensional column chart with alpha-blending and dynamic labeling? While the technical side of me says "yes! Let's make a mpg movie while we fly through the results, with laser beams shooting at the highest scores!" the practical side is afraid the answer is: not likely. But still, it's always fun to watch the computer crunch some numbers and make pretty pictures. And it's probably much better to play around with data that represents quality at your organization than fight demons in the latest version of DOOM. After all, if you're not careful, you just might learn something worth a lot of money!
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While the colors are certainly nice, there is little information easily gleaned from this graph masterpiece. You have created a three dimensional image that you are trying to show on a two dimensional medium, that is not easy. Looking at this graph gave me a headache! My suggestion is to ditch it!