I’m continually discouraged by people’s misunderstanding of the term “Dashboard” as it relates to understanding their company’s performance.
A good dashboard doesn’t have loads of colors and visual effects. A good dashboard isn’t overwhelmed by logos and pictures of actors masquerading as happy employees and customers. A good business (executive, operational, etc.) dashboard is not reminiscent of an aviator’s cockpit.
I’ve found a wonderful description of a dashboard, in How to Build a Data-Driven Startup on David Cancel’s blog. This is slide 41 from his presentation this summer at the Lean Startup Circle.
The following slides give crucial advice for what goes into dashboards, and what you should do with the resulting observations.
Thanks to @JanWillemTulp for the heads up.
dan l says
The slide you highlighted is good.
Some of his other thoughts seem…..well……
“data visualizations are a waste of time”
“Only use line charts, bar charts, and pie charts”?
errr. Maybe those ideas are good for startups.
Chandoo says
While his explanation is ok, I disagree that dashboards only show where you suck. He may have used that to ingest some humor in to cluttered slide deck. (41.. ok)
I too think dashboards are mis-understood, mis-used, mis-represented. But in my mind, “they tell you what is going on with a particular project / business / functional area” so that you can make a decision or get a grip of reality. That is if they are done right.
Jon Peltier says
Dan, Chandoo –
The point is, keep it simple. It’s most important to see where things aren’t working. If things are going okay, or at least aren’t bad enough to be high on the priority list, there’s no sense in taking up valuable real estate. Put them into a different report that can be consumed at leisure. Or at least don’t emphasize them, so the trouble spots are easy to pick out.
Joe says
Hi Jon,
I really enjoy your site (Chandoo’s as well). I have learned quite a lot. That said, I disagree with not putting things on the dashboard that are OK. It goes back to what the dashboard is used for and who the audience is for the dashboard. Lets say I have a product platform with 10-12 products. I would create a one slide dashboard to indicate the status for each product and an overall chart to show the relative status. If I had a different dashboard for each product I would really confuse the audience. I need to have a dashboard which lists all of the problem areas (and non-problem areas for some products). I am just trying to show all the speed bumps and roadblocks for each product and an overall relative status. It is really used for me to justify additional resources and monies if needed or show reasons to divert resources from other products.
Overall I agree with your philosophy even on pastel colors, however I have noticed that a lot of people can’t pick out problems unless I use red- again more of an audience issue.
I look forward to seeing the promised posting on how to make horizontal bullet charts (hint, hint ; ) ).
Regards,
Joe
Jon Peltier says
Hi Joe –
I think I misstated my thoughts in the comment on Chandoo’s site. You don’t want to just show the bad stuff, you ought to show some good stuff in comparison. But you need to highlight the places where you need to deploy resources.
You can set up a grid of display elements showing all of the different items. The ones that are good show the data, but in black and white, while the ones that are bad have some kind of highlighting that screams “Fix Me!” A red marker, a red cell, whatever. Bright red is okay here, it’s not okay as a fill in a large region of a chart. These red highlights should be used infrequently, only a few times on a screen for the absolutely worst cases, because if everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted. (Look at a whole worksheet full of bold text.)
You may decide streamline tables by showing the five best and five worst, and leave off the 40 in between. You may streamline a timeline by showing {this month, last month, last three months, last six months, last year} rather than every month, as long as you clearly label the time axis. For details on this last trick, see Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies
or Excel Dashboards and Reports, both by Michael Alexander.
Kip Lawrence says
I really like the one slide you highlighted!
Look at the red highlighted words: single, entire and suck.
single: One central location for data. Many companies spread data all over the place and no one knows where to find it.
entire: Make the dashboard available to everyone. Data transparency.
suck: A dashboard which shows your pain points will also help you to make the hard decisions that help you to improve.
Coach says
Jon, I agree partly with your highlighted slide however I think it is a bit too generalised. I implemented an interesting dashboard for a medium-sized corporate in South Africa some time last year – for use in their HR department of all places… not the typical home for such an excel tool but it’s proving very effective.
From a business coaching perspective, employees that can see themselves making visible progress against their own established goals are much more motivated than those that cannot. The dashboard in this instance displayed a snapshot of a number of scaled variables including employee satisfaction, work-life balance etc at the start of the year. It then went on to display the current values of those ratings along-side so employees could see where they were progressing and where they were falling short of their own expectations. (i.e. so not just where they ‘sucked’ but also where they are well on track). The overall employee satisfaction results showed an improvement of over 20% in the first six months after the implementation of the dashboard.
Jon Peltier says
Pratish –
There are no statements which are completely black and white. A good dashboard does not just show the good, but an emphasis on where goals are not being met helps improve performance. I’m sure the employees using your dashboard are changing their performance more because of the “needs improvement” items than the “meeting expectations” ones. If you are limited by space, showing the poor performance areas is more important, since the others likely need little attention.
Coach says
Hi Jon
My point was exactly that… there is no black and white with a dashboard and it very much depends on what you’re trying to achieve (was just giving a counter-example to the ‘dashboards show what sucks most’ slide). In this case it was to increase motivation and it’s visible progress that drives that more than presenting data as ‘needs improvement’ areas.. it’s just a point I thought would be useful for readers because as a management consultant previously we used to present it in the ‘you suck here’ way and those dashboards were a lot tougher sell to middle-management than those representing data this way (demonstrating where you are now with respect to where you were before)
Jon Peltier says
Pratish –
I just remembered the first dashboard type display I even encountered. We didn’t call it a dashboard, but it was part of a “Visual Workplace” initiative in a manufacturing facility.
The management wanted to make the facility more lean, and the workers resisted. But everyone got together and decided to start by leaning out one of the machining cells. Part of the Visual Workplace was a 3 by 4 foot panel with various run charts showing scrap rate, throughput, end so forth. Other workers saw how the machinist’s numbers went up, and argued about whose cell should be next to be leaned out.
The carrot in this case was more effective than a stick would have been. So your point is correct, that there is no black and white, and the appropriate use depends on the situation.
Kirsty says
Informative article and slideshow. I stumbled across this when I was researching for a similar topic- a post entitled “Which chart should I use and when? A guide to dashboard charts”. You may be interested in reading it considering your interest in this area. I would welcome your thoughts on it too. You can access it here: http://bimehq.com/data-visualization/which-chart/
Jon Peltier says
Hi Kirsty –
It’s a good article. You might point out that a pie chart can usually be replaced by a bar chart to make the data easier to compare. The pie chart in your article (reproduced below)…
… can be replaced by a bar chart, showing the same data and labels, in a smaller space:
In a pie chart, the colors are almost essential to distinguish the data points (especially if a legend is used), but in a bar chart the colors are unneeded, and in fact, may be a detraction. So here’s a monochromatic version:
If the labels are going to stay with the chart, you can eliminate the axis without any loss of comprehension:
Kirsty says
Hi Jon,
I just saw your reply. Thanks for the explanation – I totally agree. I actually wrote something a few months back about color and data visualization, which overlaps with what you were saying about using one color so as not to detract from the data. If you’re interested, you can find it here.
http://bimeanalytics.com/blog/color-data-visualization/
Thanks!