Challenge
Collaboration across multiple levels of the organization is vital. Think of conversations in three interconnected layers:
- Operational - front-line workers and supervisors must track core operational processes, such as inventory on-hand or work in progress, equipment availability, staffing levels, or customer traffic.
- Tactical - Department managers and analysts aggregate, monitor, and analyze departmental activities, processes, and projects. For example, cost/profit center financials, employee turnover, safety incidents, or daily sales forecasts.
- Strategic - Executive leadership monitors the organization's progress toward achieving strategic objectives, including project status, financial and investment results or forecasts, customer and industry segment movements.
Flattened organization hierarchies and geographically dispersed employees - make it critical that teams converse using fresh data and have a consistent definition of information to support decision making.
Voice of the customer - Pain points
- Geography and management responsibility need more straightforward access to financial and operational information viewed by the various business operating perspectives.
- Very difficult to get to the "why" behind financial variances.
- Driving awareness of "executing strategy" at the operational level – focus on the critical few measures leading to accomplishing business objectives
- Lack consistent definition of "sales" or "customer" or "project status."
- Must drive accountability for results to get things done
The pain points are shared across every industry vertical, for-profit and non-profit, Fortune 500, and start-up/mid-sized organizations.
Applied Expertise
Leveraging my industry and data visualization expertise, we used the following methodology:
Vision and Change: Share the organization's vision and key priorities. Build the culture of a common goal and a rallying point focusing on success. Unequivocally state how the organization will achieve its vision. What is the business story the dashboard must communicate?
Define Plays: Operationalize – define team objectives, outcomes, and metrics; set accountability – who does what and when. Understand how teams work and share information cross-functionally.
Data Tells the Story: Understand and define the critical data needed to support analysis. Define the metrics that quantify forward progress and flag trends and calls to action.
Building and deploying the dashboard is based upon these four planks:
- Business Processes - Objectives, outcomes, and risks
- Organization - People, Accountability, and Metrics
- Information: Data, Business Rules, and Governance
- Technology: Architecture and Applications
The teams used various technologies to build the dashboard: Oracle Hyperion, OneStream, Google Data Studio, and Notion. Our dashboard tool selection balanced the customer's current corporate performance management technology and information technology's desired tech blueprint.
Additionally, our dashboard design must be flexible and tech-friendly to encourage adding new widgets, reports, and information sources.
Benefit and Value Achieved
Dashboards provides a full view of the business priorities – help you understand the critical few activities that make a difference in the organizations. Metrics reflect your strategy – customer, operations, and employee - and provide a window into your performance.
Presenting data in a format that can be easily shared and understood is better than consuming the raw numbers. The essence of the message is quickly communicated to inform and allow a further investigation to those wanting more detail — decision making is a collaborative process.
The dashboard tells our story:
- How happy are our customers?
- Do we really build and deliver an ultra-high-quality product that customers will pay a premium?
- Are we listening to our customers and anticipating customer/enthusiast trends?
- Can we work efficiently? Profit?
- Are we keeping our internal commitments?
