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Design a dashboard!

Whereas 10 years ago the availability of dashboards was a luxury, reserved only for the larger companies, dashboards are now widely available everywhere. For any question within a company, the solution soon seems to be: design a dashboard! For every list you used to receive in your mailbox, a report with monthly figures or survey results, a dashboard is often created with Tableau, Qliksense, PowerBI or one of the other providers. Not seeing the forest for the trees clearly applies here

“I can view our business results in 9 different dashboards. But how well are we actually doing?”

Dashboard

Dashboard

As far as we are concerned, this is only limited progress; the proliferation of dashboards available may make you feel better informed, but not always make better decisions. To arrive at a desired situation where relevant dashboards support you in making decisions, a number of steps are required. What these steps are and how to apply them we will discuss in a series of four articles.

In this first article, we answer the question of when a dashboard is indeed a good idea and what conditions a good dashboard meets. But before we dive into the depths, let’s start with the basics: what exactly is a dashboard?

What is a dashboard?

  1. First of all, a dashboard is a tool that provides an accurate picture of the current status of your goals. A dashboard answers a central question and contains enough detail to assess whether or not a development fits an objective.
  2. Second, a well-designed dashboard invites action: it draws attention to critical components, allows you to zoom in on underlying causes in the data, and provides information needed to take action. A dashboard, unlike a report, is dynamic; it allows the user to interact with data and visualizations. A dashboard is used on a screen and not on paper.
  3. Finally, a dashboard is connected to dynamic resources that can be refreshed on demand or in real time. Assessing current status against objectives is thus a dynamic process.

When is a dashboard a good idea?

As mentioned, the wide availability of dashboard software regularly leads to proliferation of dashboards without a clear purpose. And concrete goals is what the bottom line is all about. At Cmotions, we work extensively with the Target to Data model to help clients connect their mission and vision, through business and customer goals to data and insights. If you have a clear understanding of what your goals are and how you can influence them (the drivers), it becomes possible to make progress on goals measurable and to manage the drivers you can influence. Only in this way are you as an organization able to make the distance to your goal measurable and achieve your goals.

Target to data – Dashboard design and use

Keeping a grip on the progress of achieving your goals can be done with the help of a dashboard. Note that a dashboard can be a useful tool under a number of conditions. Before developing a dashboard, ask the following questions:

  • Who is going to use the dashboard?
  • At what times will the dashboard be used?
  • What central question does the dashboard answer?
  • What level of detail is needed to take action based on the data?
  • Who is ultimately responsible for taking action based on progress on business goals?
  • Without clear agreements on this, you run the risk of the dashboard answering a question that was never asked, not looked at, or worst of all: not leading to action.

What does a good dashboard meet?

A good dashboard provides insight into the performance of business or customer goals through performance on the drivers (KPIs). There should be no doubt when interacting with a dashboard whether the result displayed is positive or negative. So suppose a company’s goal is to increase sales by 20% in 2021 compared to 2020 then one of the drivers could be the number of customers and a metric to measure this could be the percentage monthly growth in the number of customers. Other drivers for increasing sales include the number of orders or the price of products.

The metrics you use are generally relative to a previous performance (number of customers last year or past 6 months) or a target (achievement against goal). A visualization in the dashboard that plots the results achieved against the targets on the relevant driver allows action to be taken.

Do you have clarity on goals, drivers and metrics? Have you also named responsibilities by answering the questions above? Then a dashboard can be a perfect tool to keep a grip on the progress of achieving your goals. Our best practices for follow-up then consist of these steps, which we explain in subsequent articles:

  • The data design.
  • Design and visualization.
  • Adoption of the dashboard.

These are not straightforward steps that you must follow sequentially to arrive at a dashboard. We see it as different parts that you will have to pay attention to several times during the process to achieve a good end result. In our next article, we explain our steps for data design under the hood of a dashboard.

Principal Consultant & Data Scientist w.v.gils@cmotions.nl
Nieck de Groot
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