Dashboards Expectations and Reality

Dashboard for a Bank

Recently while working on the engagement I was interviewing the team to get the requirements. As a part of the process we check the current pain points. Here are some of the pain points shown to the stakeholders and were asked to choose more than one if required

What challenges are you facing for data analysis? (Choose more than one if needed)

1. We need to see trends in the data, but can’t

2. Our Systems has limited reporting capabilities

3. Our technical people are spread too thin and don’t have enough bandwidth to help

4. The pipeline data is locked in the other places, or we have to manually download it into spreadsheets

5. None.

As expected reason 1 and 3 were the major pain points. If you want to avoid the pain and design effective dashboards that help managers then this discussion will help you to just achieve that.

Most organizations face one or many of these challenges. They do not have a process to design the dashboards. Many organizations do not have the clarity between reporting and dashboards. The link between dashboards and reporting could be clarified as follows:

• The dashboard is a management tool linked to the business's strategic objectives; it is a summary based on a top-down logic

• Reporting is a tool for providing information to monitor a particular area, generally in a detailed, static and bottom-up manner

• The linkage between these two tools must allow the dashboard to remain simple and concise, relying on detailed reporting for in-depth analyses.

Other issues could be

• Dashboards not sufficiently orientated towards action

• Lack of accompanying information

Managers Want Dashboards To Be A Genuine Decision support Tool.

The dashboard's objectives embody the level of expectations that managers have. Based on my experience there can be broadly two main objectives:

• Track implementation of strategic and operational objectives

• Manage the field of business.

Managers lay particular emphasis on tracking implementation of the strategy and assessing the impact of operational action plans and have need for alerts if there are problems.

A successful dashboard has following ingredients: Here are the key factors for designing the dashboards.

Indicators are key ingredients of a a dashboard. They can be split in to two categories

• Lagging Indicators

– Measure performance that has already happened

– Financial Statements: Revenue, Gross Margin, Profit

• Leading Indicators

– Indicate the direction of in-course performance

– Leading indicators enable in-course corrections, so frequent (daily) updates are valuable

Dashboard should have both Leading and Lagging indicators

· Use of "SMART" indicators: Indicators must be simple and Specific so that stakeholders adopt them easily. They must be Measurable so that changes in the indicator can be evaluated with sufficient accuracy without necessarily relying on accounting data. They must also be Achievable, in other words realistic and linked to the management cycle to cover the allocation of the underlying resources. Next, someone must be Responsible for them and they must be Time-bound.

· Effective Navigation: Intuitive and easy navigation goes a long way in adoption of the dashboards

· Consistent use of Colors: Colors are powerful eye navigators so use them correctly.

· Simple, linked and dynamic dashboards: here should be no more than 20 indicators, with a presentation at several levels of interpretation, offering a summary view and a facility for looking at subjects in more depth

Building effective useful dashboard is not easy. It requires iterative work to make it usable and effective. A 10 point checklist that you can use while designing the dashboards.

Must have Tableau Dashboard Parameters