Sometime back I was working on an assignment to conceptualize and design an engagement level dashboard. That was when I came across a very relevant dilbert comic strip where “Dogbert the Consultant” says that the business requires a dashboard application to track metrics, so that the management will have more data to ignore and the business can go ahead and take decisions on “political compulsions”. I think the dashboard story in most product and service organizations is not much different. Despite acknowledging the need and importance of a performance monitoring dashboard, organizations, business units, programs and projects consistently fail to create and maintain an effective performance dashboard. A survey by the PMO Executive Council concludes the following:
Although the survey is dated 2006, my experience leads me to believe that the effectiveness numbers won’t have changed much. Despite increasing time being spent on reporting, the effectiveness of the dashboards remains low. So, let’s address the important question: How to make dashboards effective?
Some of the critical steps are the following:
1. Establish a Strategic PMO
(More on this in my next article)
The program management function becomes the pivot which establishes the governance and performance mechanisms and provides relevant data input to decision makers to steer the business engagement in the right direction. Strategic PMOs are not influenced by “Power Politics,” but create a culture of trust and transparency.
Source for Graphic : Report by PMO Executive Council: “From Data to Decisions: Influencing Portfolio Outcomes Through Target Dashboards”
2. Metric Selection
Identify relevant KPIs for the business engagement. Cover a mix of leading and lagging indicators. Identify relevance by understanding the impact of the metric on strategic objectives. If a metric doesn’t help you decide a course of action toward an objective, it is useless.
3. Data Collection
Data owners need to be onboarded onto the dashboard development and aligned with the PMO team. They need to be educated on the importance and need for the data and about the data collection process. They also need to have tools to help them collect the data.
4. Engage Stakeholders
Always design the dashboard with the audience in mind. It is difficult to miss decision makers, but more effort is required to engage the ground level teams. It is important to help them identify metrics relevant to them and help them visualize their overall impact on the business. This will help build credibility and support for the dashboard across the organization. This is critical, because most of the time people fail to provide timely data because they do not see its value.
5. Data Presentation and Analysis
Representation of the metrics in an easily understandable format is very important. Decision makers want “real time” relevant data to help them make decisions on future courses of action. Some of the standard data elements required are metric trends, actual vs. targeted values and associated analysis of what worked and what didn’t.
6. Continuous Realignment
This is a primary responsibility of the strategic PMO team. They need to ensure that metrics, data owners and data analysis reflect the current context of the business. If you allow the data to be out of tune, the purpose of the dashboard is defeated.
The dashboard in your car gives you real time data on operational performance. You are able to refuel in time because the fuel indicator gives you a current indication of the fuel level. The indication itself is possible because of a nice little sensor feeding real time data. The effectiveness of the dashboard in one’s car is the best inspiration one can take. Businesses need to get their “meters” and “data sensors” in place if they really don’t want the drivers of their businesses to run out of fuel midway on the road to profitability and growth.
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