Indicators, objectives, balanced scorecard and history - all companies have different levels of maturity with regard to these topics. Here are four pro tips that will give you dashboards to be proud of.
Focus on indicators that track your core strategies:
The ideal is between 5 and 9 indicators and no more, 7 being the objective. This forces you to make a selection and get to the point. You should also take care not to create a reporting dashboard and find the right balance between the four types of indicators to be tracked:
The primary objective is to put achievements, goals and forecasts into perspective.
Indicators mean objectives. And when it comes to objectives, those which are too individual are to be avoided at all costs. It is much riskier to get everyone concentrating on their individual performance rather than give a group a collective performance target. Avoid internal warfare and competition by actually uniting your teams behind team indicators.
However, people can only strive for something that’s tangible and that they understand. So make sure you choose objectives (and thus indicators) that are both concrete and related to the business of the teams that are monitoring them. Some good and bad examples:
In short, as you will have realised, the more meaningful an indicator is, the more likely it is to be improved.
As with all measurements, whether physical (e.g. the temperature of a room) or of a business (e.g. CHURN), the indicator can be subject to confusion which distorts the value. Implementing a good dashboard, therefore, absolutely requires protection from such confusion.
It's a fact that we tend to look at what is attractive and ignore what is ugly. However, although we are all attached to the relevance of our indicators, we often forget to present them in an attractive manner.
Have you ever given your website or your company brochure a makeover? Well, you need to put the same energy into the look of your dashboard: readability, harmonious colours, attractive fonts, images, etc.
And since beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some people's choices won't please others, minimalism is your best bet - nobody will be able to tell you that a single figure written in Calibri is ugly.
The best business success stories often combine the good and the beautiful...