An empirical study on the effect of 3D visualization for project tasks and resources

• Project tasks and resources were visualized in three-dimensional graphics.
• A controlled study confirmed effective support for project management.
• This approach led to 40% higher accuracy and 39% less time.

During software development, project managers (PMs) continually monitor, analyze and control the project schedule. The schedule contains tasks, work items, and resources assigned to carry out the tasks. Current state-of-the-art monitoring involves methods such as Gantt charts and spreadsheets/tables to display and analyze the project schedule, tasks and resources information PMBOK (2004). These methods, however, have certain limitations. It is difficult to see the entire schedule in a single view and analyze the tasks and resources especially in the case of large data. There is also little support for interacting with the data, and the Gantt chart does not show history information and trends. In this paper, we develop an approach that uses 3D visualizations to represent information about project tasks and resources, to overcome the above limitations. To assess our approach, we conduct an empirical study on real-world projects using 42 participants from both academia and industry. We developed a prototype tool named 3DProjView for the study. The study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of using 3D visualizations versus Gantt chart and tables. The results indicate that participants using 3D visualizations achieved an average of 40% higher accuracy and spent on average 39% less time analyzing project tasks and resources, further indicating that our approach effectively helps project managers in both accuracy and efficiency for monitoring project performance.