Dragon1 Standard: Project Landscape Map

What is a Project Landscape Map?

A Project Landscape Map is a defined diagram type in the Dragon1 method. A project landscape map is a generic overview of the structure of a project.

Often the structure of projects is not clear at all amongst the projects' stakeholders. Sometimes only the project manager or some of the steering group members have this kind of view. But too often there is no clear or shared view of the project structure.

In that case repairing faults, doing damage control, improving the structure is really impossible. Because: where do you start?

An old Chinese saying is: if you don't have an overview of your soldiers, you cannot prioritize the actions for the attack by your army.

So you need an overview in order to prioritize.

What is a Project Landscape Map Report View?

A Project Landscape Map Report View is a visualization wherein a top layer, the status and progress of the structure of a project is reported.

A Management Report View of your Project

Below you see an example report view of the Project Landscape Map. This visualization is the same as the previous one, only now every item on the diagram has a color indicating whether the underlying document or product is correct, completed, available and/or approved on time.

The red color on this example report view tell us a viewer quickly which products or documents are incorrect, incomplete, not available or not approved on time. Now you can start to fix things. You can prioritize because you have a (shared) overview of the current status of the project's structure.

Why create a Project Landscape Map?

Creating a Project Landscape Map is only sensible if it has a number of direct benefits for the business. Three benefits of creating a Project Landscape Map have a direct impact on certain business outcomes. These are:

Benefits*	Business Outcomes*
Giving an overview of the all the important and necessary products and documents and their correct version, status, ownership and location.	Mitigating miscommunication on what is what.
Having insights in the critical path of the project.	An objective and honest estimate when things CAN be ready!
Having a shared view of the need deliverables related to the solution components.	Not creating more deliverables or building more components than necessary.

How did this visualization already save project time & project budget?

This visualization has already saved project time & project budget for a large number of projects. Below there are three practical case situations in projects where this visualization has helped to solve the problem.

Case 1 - A project was started up and the consultants of the suppliers were creating deliverables, only half the project it was found out that deliverables would not fit together - At that moment the project landscape map was made by us and showed that a solution architecture blueprint was missing and that three conflicting standards were used. Based on this visualization the decision was made to create a solution architecture blueprint and select the correct standards and recreate some deliverables using only the correct standards. The project could be finished before time as a success saving time and money.
Case 2 - A project was already running for 7 years. Now the business processes in the organization were analyzed and redesigned to have the solution, that was realized in the project, be used optimally during work. Only it was found that functionality in the solution was missing and no deliverables were defined to provide for this functionality and there was no budget and time to create the functionality - At that moment the Project Landscape Map was created by us and it showed that the original business case was not a valid financial business case anymore because I was not linked to any of the business goals and the project took too long (more than 9 months) to execute outdating the current solution concept by years. The project manager advised the owner client to stop the project. The owner client ordered to use the project time and budget for creating a new valid business case.
Case 3 -A program consisting of 5 projects was already running for three years. The project was running out of time, but not out of budget. So in order to deliver the project on time more and more, consultants were hired to create the planned deliverables. But on every deliverable created two or three new unplanned deliverables were defined by the projects, so the time necessary to finish the project increased every week - At that moment we created the Project Landscape Map and it shows that the business case never was approved, the was not a single document for requirements, there was no single solution architecture blueprint giving a logical overview of all deliverables as solution components integrated. Based on this visualization the business case was decided to be updated and approved of and the requirements excel sheets were integrated into a single approved document. Next, a solution blueprint could be created showing that 70% percent of the deliverables were not necessary within the scope and context of the solution. This all leads to successfully rounding the project exactly on time.

How to create a Project Landscape Map?

Enter your project data in the project model. Next, you alter the project landscape view addressing your concerns and issues. Next, you enter the rules for the indicators on the progress and status layer (making items color green, orange or red). Next, you have Dragon1 generate the Project Landscape Map for you. Next, you publish the Project Landscape Map publicly or privately for your stakeholders. Finally, the stakeholders will use the Project Landscape Map to support their decisions.