Why Every Problem Needs a New Dashboard

There comes a moment in every organisation when somebody notices that something is going badly. Orders are late. Customers are leaving. The printer has developed an openly adversarial position. An inexperienced manager might attempt to resolve the underlying issue. A leader commissions a dashboard.

A dashboard transforms an uncomfortable fact into a manageable rectangle. Where once you had a problem, you now have a problem with a date filter. This is progress of a sort, and progress of a sort is what the quarterly report requires.

Start with the colours

The key to effective reporting is a generous interpretation of green. A target missed by 12 per cent is not red; it is amber with strategic headroom. If the metric continues to deteriorate, adjust the target. The line will recover immediately, which demonstrates the value of decisive management.

Avoid displaying raw numbers without context. Context, in this instance, means a sufficiently complicated collection of other numbers that nobody can remember which one they were worried about.

Give every department its own truth

Sales should have a dashboard. Finance should have another. Operations should have a third that updates on a different schedule and uses a slightly different definition of “customer”. This creates healthy debate and ensures no meeting ends prematurely with agreement.

When someone asks why the figures do not match, explain that the teams are looking at different lenses. Do not specify what the lenses are attached to. Schedule a data alignment workshop.

Measure the dashboard

Once the dashboard is live, introduce a dashboard adoption dashboard. Track logins, dwell time and the percentage of colleagues who have successfully located the password reset email. If adoption is low, make checking it a performance objective. You are now measuring a behaviour that exists solely because you decided to measure it.

The original problem may persist. This is not a failure of the dashboard. It is evidence that the business needs a single source of truth, preferably purchased through a six-month procurement exercise.

Know when you have succeeded

Success arrives when the meeting about the late orders is replaced by a meeting about whether the late-orders widget should be a bar chart. At this point, the dashboard has done its job. Nobody is asking about the orders.