we have an organization that has about 50 different software projects going on (about 90 developers). some big, some small. some are front to back solutions and some are building on top of existing solutions and technologies.
some of these projects are new initiative and some are incremental improvements over existing software that we built.
our senior management is looking for a sleek way to visualize all the projects going on including:
the reason is that we probably want to move resources around to ensure top ROI but not all developer are fungible depending on their skill set.
in my head, this results in some type of heatmap or dashboard, but i wanted to see if there are any recommend solution or tools out there that attack this area.
right now we just have spreadsheets listing out each project and resources and somehow it doesn't really give a good visualization of whats actually happening.
any suggestions?
As I understand this question the solution is highly dependent on final goal which actually is unclear in most of similar cases.
Before doing some 'kanban-like diagrams' for this case especially having in mind declared goal (I suggest it is only mean, not a goal) to re-balance work force I'd recommend to think about next points:
So I'd recommend (instead or in addition to project efficiency tracking) to track developers efficiency / satisfaction / team efficiency / satisfaction and try to solve how to re-balance efforts not only because of ROI but to get most from people (at least unless projects are profitable not to put ROI estimations over all). Don't ruin successful (not so but yes) project just because someone needs one developer in other bright project.
OK, this is just my general opinion but it greatly helped me during last year. Hope it will help someone too.