Towards Living Canvases

We discuss how to better support practitioners in understanding, planning and executing their projects through visual guidance via e.g., canvases and diagram-based frameworks implemented as IT tools. Today, too many important aspects are overlooked during project development: opportunities to mitigate risks, innovation potentials and stakeholder alignment. We analyze whether a more holistic and integrated approach connecting different perspectives actually leads to new insights, relevant for a project's success. Based on our bespoke integrative analysis support, the case study indeed disclosed otherwise unaddressed important risks, that might lead to the project's failure if no mitigation strategies and new actions are introduced. This analysis stage is success critical, but often just gets done in a rudimentary fashion failing to reveal the most critical success factors, key actions and challenges. With missing benefits, it is obvious that it is often considered a waste of resources and left out altogether. To change this situation and standardize the analysis process in a customized way, we argue that adequate, advanced IT tool support is needed to better guide practitioners and integrate and aggregate the knowledge of the organization, teams and experts into a global organization-wide knowledge management infrastructure.