What should be included in a business dashboard?
The four most fascinating aspects of building a business dashboard — How to start using it? Just take a quick look in a glance
This article discusses the most important and critical aspects of a business dashboard that must be included in your business dashboard and how to begin using it at a glance.
Business dashboards are extremely important for a great number of reasons for visualizing your business data: They help you to manage business complexities, provide quick access to authentic information about your business, and help you in following through with action to be taken.
No one can refuse their benefits and importance and wanted to create one but might be not sure how and from where to start. You might have heard this story so many times before, so I have written this blog for you.
So, let's get started. First of all, you should know the stakeholders of your audience. Your audience is the senior-level management at your organization, a group of departmental directors, or C-level leadership you should keep this in your mind.
It does no harm for you to share bad news with your senior management, as a business dashboard is meant particularly for the senior-level management and not for consumption outside of the business unit. Although, there’s a common practice in many organizations to add spin to certain news as it makes someone upset in the management chain, but that is the wrong practice for a solid business dashboard. The truth needs to be out there so the senior-level leadership in your organization can see the problems the organization is facing and make the right decisions to overcome the problem.
To keep that in mind, I’ve outlined a few important things you must include in your business dashboard template—and some additional tips and tricks to get you on your feet.
1. Include RAG status indicators to your business dashboard
RAG —or red, amber, green—statuses are important to include on a business dashboard template so the stakeholder knows what's important and what to focus on. RAG acts as traffic lights, red is an alert, amber (or yellow) signals caution, and green means you’re in the clear. If a measure is green, the stakeholders know this is in a comfortable area and to skip over it so they can pay more attention to those that are the possibility of something unwelcome, such as yellow and red are examples.
2. Balance of Key Performance Indicators
It’s important to have a balance of KPIs across all of your graphs. Because management meetings tend to depend a great deal on financial metrics, but may not take into consideration things happening in the organization that could be affecting those financials. Using it has been observed that a strategic framework allows you to incorporate measures from across your organization, effectively solving this problem. You can, for instance, look at your HR metrics to ensure that the right people are in the right positions and at the customer, metrics to see if your customers are happy.
If you need some ideas of what is important to include, take a look at these KPI dashboards:3. Include qualitative analysis for quick interpretation.
Executive team can easily understand if you provide numbers along with the qualitative analysis. Simply providing numbers leaves a lot of room for interpretation from the team, but adding context gives them the complete story. There’s a big difference between saying, “Our sales are down for the month of March,” and saying, “Our sales are down for the month of March because no one wants to buy winter clothes when it’s 70 degrees outside. As we see this trend consistently year after year. As our customers begin thinking about winter in November through February, our sales will go up.”
In the above example, you can see how providing qualitative information that can be consumed by the executive team easily is important.
4. Include major projects and initiatives.
You must realize that most people think their project should be prioritized for one reason or another. If you’re the person working with the management team, you'll only include the most critical projects in the business dashboard and filter out the low weightage projects.
If a project is important enough to be discussed at the managerial level, it likely involves multiple departments and is critical to the business at large. For example, if the Finance department is trying to create a new committee, that’s not a whole-of-business initiative. But if they’re opening a new cost center—which likely involved several teams and a great deal of oversight—this likely qualifies as something the management team needs to be briefed on.
To determine how often the management team will meet to review the business dashboard, it depends on several factors, including how much information is available and how often those metrics are useful. Do they need to meet quarterly or would it be more useful to meet every month?
Regardless of what you choose, you need to stick to a schedule and have a regular reporting process. Everyone in the organization should know when to sit down to review the business dashboard. This keeps all the stakeholders moving fluidly and helps keep those who need it on track with deadlines.
Conclusion:, business dashboards are very important, so you might be feeling pressure from your team, executive group, or competitors to create one. But before you do, be sure to think through its purpose, focus, and use, so it’s as effective as possible.