The Projects by Process page contains several views of the projects in that process; some of these views may be unfamiliar. Once a process is selected, its process map shows at the top of the page. This is the same diagram that you designed above: a self-explanatory map of the stages that projects pass through to achieve the desired goal.
Just below the process map is a "cityscape" which shows how many projects are currently resident at each stage. The stages are in left-to-right order corresponding to the extent of process completion that each represents. The three cartoons below show scenarios which a cityscape diagram can reveal:
If there is one stage with many more projects in it than the others, you have either a synchronized process or a bottleneck. Synchronization happens when a new process begins with a backlog of projects entering the system at the same time, and at least for a while, progressing at similar rates. Some companies may synchronize projects on a quarterly or annual basis, for example to coincide with the budget cycle. However, this pattern may also signify a bottleneck: for some reason the heavily populated stage is holding up everything; it may be ill-defined, very complex, or the management may be reluctant to kill projects which honestly cannot be progressed.
In the center cartoon above there are projects at all stages and with no strong trend. This is the signature of a healthy pipeline in which project failure is uncommon, for example an automobile assembly line. If projects are entering and leaving the system at a comparable rate, this pattern will persist over time.
The last cartoon shows the pattern for a process with known, perhaps deliberate attrition. Portfolios of innovative projects of high diversity and uncertainty follow this pattern: there are more ideas than can ever be funded, and each stage raises the bar for complexity, market projections, technical feasibility, etc. A good process puts the most expensive stages late, and tries to put any stage with low costs and a strong success/failure predictor early. At the steady state, many projects enter the system (per month or year) and a few exit, highly refined and much more likely to succeed than the initial average. The highest overall portfolio value is achieved by killing projects as soon as their failure can be reasonably predicted. Pharmaceutical pipelines, with their brutal attrition as already noted, will have 100 times as many projects at the first as the last stage.
Below the cityscape is a three-in-one progress chart. The first of these charts, the default, shows the track of all projects from the time each entered the system. As the left cartoon below shows, a project should follow an upward track over time as it passes the stages and nears completion.
The diagram is most interesting when it reveals "fast track" and "lagging" projects, as the right-hand cartoon shows in blue and orange respectively. Slower projects aren't necessarily bad or in trouble; they might have high value and high complexity, but it might be worth a phone call or meeting to investigate and then share learnings with the entire process team.
The example below reveals four unusually slow projects which have taken hundreds of days longer than the most.
Hovering over a project dot will highlight its track, show its title, and highlight it in the cityscape.
The second of the three-in-one progress charts maps projects against the time spent in each stage. In this example we see that each stage has its own bar chart, with the dots signifying each project's time in that stage, and a vertical bar showing the median time in the stage (i.e. the time for which half of all projects were faster and half slower).
We see that Scoping, Transoms, and perhaps Discovery all have had a handful of outlier projects that have taken far longer than most. Additionally, because hovering over a dot highlights that project at all stages, we see that the project "Welcome New Acme Colleagues" has been seriously lagging in both Transoms and Scoping, so perhaps the hard questions should be asked about the project, not the stages.
The third progress view shows project tracks by actual calendar date, shown at the right. Again, hovering over a dot or a "brick" in the cityscape will highlight a project and show its title. Here the truant "Welcome New Acme Colleagues" project shows up having started last November, moved to Scoping in April, and now it's late August…
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