Dashboarding is a tool that is used at several level of management for making informed decision. In its early days it used to be a static one where mangement need to go through many pages or links to view different information at different level of granularity. But now a days the technology has reached such a level that now you can create such cutting edge Dashboarding solution which can accomodate both the views i.e. at a very high level and the same dashboard can be drilled down to present the low level or reason behind a particular high level chart or Key Performance Indicator.
Below is my experience and thought process (with example) which helped me while creating a daynamic dashboard for Senior and Middle management.
In just one sentence dashboard can be said as “The overall summary of the Business or Program in one page with all required data points for decision-making”. Dashboards are basically combination of various metrics and analytical charts that are related to overall business and program which a particular company is running. One of the important feature of dashboard is the high level filter or filters that are related to almost every datapoint in the dashboard so that everyone from the senior management can see their required information in just one page. That’s why it has become very important to decide at the planning stage that what are the critical data points that we need to select for the dashboard and are related to the high level filters.
Example: There is an IT Vendor “True Soft” who is providing the Software Services to A, B, C & D companies. Now senior management of True Soft wants to have a metric or dashboard in place which can show the entire summary of their program with their clients. So for the designing of the dashboard we really need to see that what is the high level filter we should use and what are the critical data points that can be used in the dashboard. Now because senior management of True Soft wants to see the summary of their Program with clients A, B, C, & D that’s why it is very simple that high level filter would be on A, B, C & D but there would be another filter which would be showing the information for all the companies and can be named as “total summary” or “overall summary” for true soft. the filter can be combo box, or list box or 5 buttons etc. so that you can quickly select any one single company or all the companies and see their program. Now the next step is that what are all the critical data points. So for an IT vendor below are couple of data points which are critical:
1. Revenue: One of the hot favourite data point for senior management as they really want to see that from where the maximum revenue is coming so that they can better positioned themselves to ensure consistent revenue from that company and even more. And can work with the client which is generating least revenue.
2. Service Satisfaction Score: This is the score that come from a survey which they roll out to companies where they are providing the services. By this they can very quickly work on the pain points that they have with particular company and ensure the quality service delivery for that company. It can also help the True Soft to assess or analyze why the satisfaction scores are different for the different companies and in this way it will help them to understand the problems more clearly that are inside the True Soft and implement the best practices from where the scores are good.
3. Defect Delivery Rate: It is also uniform for all the companies and help then assess where the defect delivery rate is high so that they can improve on that area.
4. Attrition: This can help them assess the attrition that they will have with different companies.
5. Staffing: It will help them assess how quickly they are completing the staffing request for the companies where they are providing the services.
And there can be some other data points which one can create or use according to their needs and requirements. But what I’ve seen is that in a dashboard normally there should be 5 or less than 5 data points which are very critical in most of the business or programs that one can see clearly for the decision-making. In my view using the facts and figures for more than 5 data points will actually confuse the end-user and make him unable to take the quality decision. But situations or requirements can be differ so at the end, it really depends on what your business requirement is.
So it is not a rule of thumb that you really need to use 5 or less than 5 critical data points. And there can be 6 or 7 critical data points that are important for one’s decision-making but the best practice from my point of view is to show maximum up to 5 critical data points in your dashboard.
One other important point is that we should always leave some space for the user to make a comment in your dashboard about a particular metric or about any other figure that you have putted there that is effecting the business so that other users can also se his/her comments and can make good discussion around it, which will help them to truly utilize the dashboard at the max.
Thanks.
-Abhi
