Article - Performance Dashboards

Question 1

What does a dashboard do?

Answer 1

Providing visual displays of important information that is consolidated and arranged on a single screen so that the information can be digested at a single glance and easily drilled in and further explored.

Question 2

Of which kind of systems are performance dashboards common components of?

Answer 2

• Performance Management Systems;
• Performance measurement systems;
• BPM software suites;
• BI Platforms

Question 3

What is the most distinctive feature of a dashboard?

Answer 3

That it has 3 layers of information:

• Monitoring
• Analysis
• Management

Question 4

What kind of information is given in the monitoring layer?

Answer 4

Graphical, abstracted data to monitor key performance metrics

Question 5

What kind of information is given in the analysis layer?

Answer 5

Summarized dimensional data to analyze the root cause of problems

Question 6

What kind of information is given in the management layer?

Answer 6

Detailed operational data that identifies what actions to take to resolve a problem

Question 7

What is a fundamental challenge of dashboard design?

Answer 7

To display all the required information on a single screen, clearly and without distraction, in a manner that can be assimilated quickly.

Question 8

How can you speed up the assimilation of numbers?

Answer 8

By placing the numbers into context, most commonly by comparing them to other baseline/target numbers

Question 9

What are common comparisons made in business intelligence systems?

Answer 9

Against:

1. Past values
2. Forecasted values
3. Targeted values
4. Average values
5. Multiple instances of the same value
6. The value of other measures (cost vs revenue)

Question 10

What is meant by evaluative designations with comparing numbers?

Answer 10

Specifying whether a value is good or bad and whether it is trending in the right direction. Otherwise it is still time consuming

-> can be done with visualization/color coding etc.

Question 11

What are two (of which the second exist out of 6 points) design characteristics shared by performance dashboards?

Answer 11

1. They all fit within the larger business intelligence and/or performance measurement system
2. They have the following characteristics:
3. They use visual components to highlight what needs action.
4. They are transparent to the user (little training)
5. They combine data from different sources and summarize
6. They enable drill-down or drill-through to underlying data sources or reports
7. Present dynamic real-world view with realtime data
8. Require little coding to implement, deploy and maintain.

Question 12

What are 8 best practices for dashboard design?

Answer 12

1. Benchmark KPI’s with industry standards
2. Wrap the dashboard metrics with contextual metadata
3. Validate the dashboard design by a usability specialist
4. Prioritize and rank alerts/exceptions streamed to the dashboard
5. Enrich the dashboard with business users comments
6. Present information in three layers
7. Pick the right visual construct using dashboard design principles
8. Provide guided analytics

Question 13

For which kind of user questions is it important to add meta data to your dashboard information?

Answer 13

• Where did you source the data;
• What percentage of data got rejected when sourcing the data;
• Is the information fresh or stale;
• When was the warehouse data last refreshed;

Question 14

Which three levels of management capability are there which can be related to dashboards?

Answer 14

1. Being aware of the elements happening around the company

2;. Understanding what that information means for the company now.

4. Understanding what that information means for the company in the future.