Measure what Matters - Dashboard Design and Usage

It was in the mid 2000's, and I was leading a team of engineers on a data warehouse on some PLCC (Private Label Credit Card) data.  There were reports run, downtime, tickets issued, and ultimately, the customer (internal customer - business team, and external customer - the real client whose data it was) were complaining about the performance of the data warehouse.

This is a real life story on how design of the dashboard, and how one manages those who review the dashboards actually works in the real world.

The following are my lessons learned on how to effectively manage a dashboard of the right metrics at the right time.

1) Have a dashboard that is aligned to be meaningful to whoever is looking at it.

2) There may be different stakeholders reviewing the dashboard, thus may need a permissioned, and personalized dashboard for the different stakeholders.  Case is point is that a practitioner may want to have the internal metrics on one part of the dashboard, while presenting the external metrics on the other part of the dashboard.

3) One often has a baseline on what the stakeholders want and what they are looking at to represent what they want, and there may need to be changes to the data presented to ensure that they stakeholders are reviewing what is important to their business.  Often times, the tech teams are so hung up on what they think is important, that they only have half of the story is being told, and there is extra or dependent information that must be in context to tell the whole story.

4) After interviewing the business team, and the business-tech translation team, then the actual needs of the report become unveiled, and the tech team can begin to make provisions to create that report on a reliable basis for leadership to review.

5) Many times, the reports do not add value, and thus go unreviewed, and sorry to say, but even though an entire team may spend the entire week generating that report, at times, it is only reviewed for a minute or not at all by the business executives.

6) My view is the aesthetics of the report are not as valuable as the ability to tell a message with the data.
Telling the message with the data actually takes a lot of hard work understanding the goals of the executive, and the variety of political context that they executive may be under.

7) Designing and populating a dashboard to drive decisions is key and the aforementioned items help to contextualize the importance of the various components of the dashboards.

8) There are various tools that do a good job of fetching the data and summarizing it into the valuable formats that the data provides so that the executives are able to make better decisions after reviewing the data.

I trust that this blog has provided a bit of insight into using dashboard to measure what matters and ensuring that the dashboards have the right data and format to support the right messages that ultimately lead to the most effective decisions being made with the data on those dashboards.