Datasheet

managers? Will the dashboard be used to share data with external customers?
Talking through these fundamentals with the right people helps align your
thoughts and avoids the creation of a dashboard that doesn’t fulfill the
necessary requirements.
Delineate the measures for the dashboard
Most dashboards are designed around a set of measures, or key performance
indicators (KPIs). A KPI is an indicator of the performance of a task deemed
to be essential to daily operations or processes. The idea is that a KPI reveals
performance that is outside the normal range for a particular measure, so
it therefore often signals the need for attention and intervention. Although
the measures you place into your dashboards may not officially be called
KPIs, they undoubtedly serve the same purpose — to draw attention to
problem areas.
The topic of creating effective KPIs for your organization is a subject worthy
of its own book and is out of the scope of this endeavor. For a detailed guide
on KPI development strategies, pick up David Parmenter’s Key Performance
Indicators: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs (Wiley). This
book provides an excellent step-by-step approach to developing and
implementing KPIs.
The measures used on a dashboard should absolutely support the initial pur-
pose of that dashboard. For example, if you’re creating a dashboard focused
on supply chain processes, it may not make sense to have human resources
headcount data incorporated. It’s generally a good practice to avoid inclusion
of nice-to-know data into your dashboards simply to fill white space or
because the data is available. If the data doesn’t support the core purpose
of the dashboard, leave it out.
Here’s another tip: When gathering the measures required for the dashboard,
I find that it often helps to write a sentence to describe the measure needed.
For example, instead of simply adding the word Revenue into my user require-
ments, I write what I call a component question, such as, “What is the overall
revenue trend for the last two years?” I call it a component question because
I intend to create a single component, such as a chart or a table, to answer
the question. For instance, if the component question is, “What is the overall
revenue trend for the last two years?,” you can imagine a chart component
answering that question by showing the two-year revenue trend.
I sometimes take this a step further and actually incorporate the component
questions into a mock layout of the dashboard to get a high-level sense of the
data the dashboard will require. Figure 1-3 illustrates an example.
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Chapter 1: Getting in the Dashboard State of Mind
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