PROBLEM
Plan and Schedules
In the world of Business, Time is Money & Every Second Counts. Organizations need to have optimized Plans and Schedules that help achieve its targets and milestones within tight deadlines, all while ensuring the best utilization of its people, activities, resources, operations and deliverables.
Planning and Scheduling applications (Fig. 1 A & B) help organizations create and manage timelines that help them achieve this considering all these parameters.
Object Overview
For enterprise scenarios, various aspects of an Object plays a significant role when millions of transactional objects are maintained to run large businesses. These aspects of an object should be contextually available to the user while performing a transaction (Fig. 2). One such critical aspect for decision making is the Schedule of an Object. (An Object: An has a unique identity, distinct characteristics and behaviours).
Problem Statement
How can we visualize a complex schedule in a view such that it is consumable across a wide variety of components and devices?
Currently a quick view for an object Schedule is not available at an overview level. Schedules across multiple objects context is possible with a detail planning/schedule interface only. This restricts user to gain insight for an individual object from timeline perspective without navigating to the detail interface of the timeline context.
SOLUTION
Micro Schedules are a micro visualization helps user to get an overview of a complex Schedule in a limited screen area that enables quick decision making without navigating into a full fledge Scheduling application. This visualization has various elements to handle various business scenarios. This micro visualization can be consumed in any part of the application (overview level, intermediate stage or a detail level) along with other information. Micro Schedules have the following key features:
1. Responsive and versatile to fit inside a variety of UI components
2. Scalable Timeline with appointments
3. Supports various Schedule types – Continuous, Unit, Breakup Schedules
4. Visual Status ( free/ busy) available
5. Supports Overlapping of Schedules, display Alternate Resources
FEATURES
1. Time Frame
Time frame captures the start and end of timeline along with timeline reference. Scalable timeline can be adapted as the business need (Calendar year, week, date, Quarter, customized range) (Fig. 4A)
2. Status
- Status shapes: offers various shape visualizations according to business scenarios to represent a particular state :
- Circle/ Rounded rectangles for unit schedule. (Fig. 4B)
- Rectangular blocks for continuous schedule (Fig. 4C)
- Connecting lines between Rectangular blocks for a breakup schedule. (Fig. 4D)
- Color: Color semantics can be mapped to a desired status (Busy/ empty/other status) (Fig. 4A)
- Overlaps: It can visually represent more than a single/overlapping status with number indication or semicircle visualization with different state. (Fig. 4E)
3. Impact lines
Status Shapes can be complemented with impact lines to highlight a particular relationship. For e.g. Alternative team member for John’s position considering certain KPIs (Assignment type, timeline) (Fig. 4F – Main and Alternate team members shown in legend)
