Creating and Using Sensitivity Charts

Sensitivity charts help you answer many "what if?" questions about your portfolio. They also help to quickly understand:
• Which attributes have the greatest impact on your projects
• How the rankings change relative to the attributes
• How the model changes relative to changing an attribute's weight

Sensitivity charts get very busy with many projects, so it helps to use zoom-boxes and to create portfolio subsets to compare small groups of projects.

Imagine that you’re trying to compare these two projects and want to know at what cost the SMART Score of Project Phoenix becomes equivalent to Project Centaurus. By drawing a horizontal line across the chart, you can see that if the cost of Project Phoenix was reduced to ~$1,700, it would have the same SCORE as Project Centaurus.

Sensitivity charts can be customized using the Sensitivity Chart Preference form.

Sensitivity charts can also help you understand how SMART value scores change when a an attribute weight changes. This is done by creating a “Test Weight” sensitivity chart.

In this chart, you can see how the SMART value scores change as the weight changes. The column of bubbles represents the current “Cost” attribute weight of 5000. If you change the weight, that column will move and the SMART ranking of the bubbles will change.

When we zoom-in, we can see how the SMART Scores change as the weight changes for the 3 projects in the chart. The points “A,“ “B,“ and “C,“ represent intersection points where the projects change ranking. For example, point “A“ represents the weight where Project Scorpio begins to have a higher SMART Score than Project Phoenix, and point “C“ represents the weight where Project Orion begins to out-rank Project Phoenix

The Sensitivity Chart Preference form let’s you control virtually all aspects of your Sensitivity chart display. You open this form by selecting [Modify Chart] at the bottom of the Sensitivity Chart display form or at the top of Sensitivity Chart List form. You can view the different options by clicking on the tabs at the top of the form.

Next: Tracking Uncertainty