Dashboard

Business Intelligence Dashboard study: Let’s take a look at the most important phase of a performance dashboard project - the requirements phase.

In all enterprise dashboard projects, there is a struggle to define what should be monitored. The users don’t always know what they really want. Your job is to help define their vision. There is a must-try KPI requirements tool  called the KPI Wheel that is made possible by the geniuses at BrightPoint Consulting. It is discussed at http://infommersion.com/Learning/nl_1005_art2.html. As BrightPoint explains:

In order to help with the requirements interview process, BrightPoint Consulting has created a tool called the KPI Wheel. The interview process is very rarely a structured linear conversation, and more often is an organic free-flowing exchange of ideas and questions. The KPI Wheel allows us to have a naturally flowing conversation with the end-user while at the same time keeping us focused on the goal of gathering specific requirements.

The KPI Wheel is tool that can be used to collect all the specific information that will go into defining and visualizing a metric or KPI. We will use this tool to collect the following information:

• The business question that we are trying to help the user answer.
• Which business users this question would apply to.
• Why the question is important.
• Where data resides to answer this question.
• What further questions this metric or KPI could raise.
• What actions or decisions could be taken with this information
• The specific measure, dimension, grain and target of the metric or KPI.

Enterprise Dashboarders should try out this interactive tool. It’s a Flex-based tool that brings you through the requirements interviewing processes and even lets you save or print out your work. If you want info on the process, read this explaination. Here’s a screenshot:

Correction: Please note that as the Managing Director at BrightPoint Consulting pointed out to me, “This tool was actually created in Xcelsius (not Flex). But we are working on a complete dashboard framework and toolset based on Flex 2.0 and MS SQL 2005.”  Thanks Tom, sorry! Watch for more samples of the great BI presentation work this outfit does. 

Tags: Business Dashboard, Excel Dashboard, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Reporting, Enterprise Business Intelligence

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

On the business side, the focus of a KPI or scorecard project is always on determining what specific levels trigger the various red/green/yellow conditions. But how, as the designer or programmer, do you lay out the dashboard screen for the user to enter these levels? We've seen hundreds of view mode screenshots, but what about edit or configure views? From the files of the very talented graphic designer at http://www.innerfacedesign.com comes this KPI trigger level input screenshot. As you can see, some KPIs require a range while others are greater than or less than an absolute number. This particular solution uses the color of the backgrounds of the sections to aid in the editing process.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Dashboard

Topic: Project Management Dashboards

Information Technology department managers know the difficulty of allocating human resources across multiple projects. What is the correct level of staffing necessary to both handle the workload quickly yet also be most cost effective? Obviously you can staff for maximum load, but the cost would be too high. Conversely, you can run a barebones staff, and save on budget, but then your capacity is constrained. How to strike a balance?

From a few years back comes this project/resource executive dashboard from http://www.innerfacedesign.com/pr_pipeline.html. It’s a fine looking dashboard by a talented designer that tracks projects not only from a current load perspective, but also from a pipeline viewpoint. On the top of the screen we have projects (current, pipeline and backlog). On the bottom of the screenshot we see resources by role and their utilization. This example uses a scenario of a User Interface Design Group and their project pipeline. The manager using this executive dashboard would look to balance the resources with the shifting project pipeline to try to optimize his productivity. Interesting graphical approach to a common departmental problem.

Tags: Project Management Dashboard, Business intelligence project management dashboards

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

This is the final enterprise dashboard screenshot in our series from http://www.itcsoftware.com/art-globalsoftwaremgtIntro.htm.  Of course, when dealing with an IT consulting project, we always want to track time spent on the project (funny thing - people want to get paid!).  Here, we see the section of the engagement management application that deals with tracking timesheets. This dashboard shows the project resources, their hourly pay rates, and a mechanism to approve or reject the timesheets.

Hope you enjoyed this series of executive dashboard screenshots. For those of us on the IT consulting side, the engagement measurements of profitability and resource allocation are old hat, but hopefully it was new and interesting to those of you on the business side.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Nice dashboards, right? We continue this series of IT consulting engagement management / application development enterprise dashboard series from http://www.itcsoftware.com/art-globalsoftwaremgtIntro.htm. In this post, we take a look at the defect tracking and change request screens.

This screenshot show the entry of a programming defect. It is straight-forward and has fields for description, severity, dependencies, assignment to a project resource, comments, etc.

This screenshot is the edit mode for a change request. It has fields for impact, cost, priorty, etc.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Continuing the Application Development Enterprise Dashboard series from http://www.itcsoftware.com/art-globalsoftwaremgtIntro.htm, we take a look at the project plan page. In this summary view, we see collapse/expand controls, task duration, start/end dates, % complete and predecessors. Note also the abilty to import and export the plan (probably from MS Project). In the second screenshot, we see listing of requirements. This screen is in edit mode. Note the use of the icons.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Since these IT Application Development Project Dashboard screenshots from http://www.itcsoftware.com/art-globalsoftwaremgtIntro.htm are so big and full of great dashboard content, I'll have to span them across several posts. We start with an enterprise dashboard screenshot that looks to be a view suitable for showing a client. They would be able to see at-a-glance the project health of multiple development efforts along with milestone tracking and high-level counts of requirements and defects. The second executive dashboard screenshot below shows an internal view for the IT service provider. Obviously, you would not want to show the client the analysis of project profitability,  resource utilization and internal productivity. By the way, this view offers a rare peek into the world of IT consulting management. For those of us inside the world IT consulting management, it's all about what resources are allocated, who is on the bench, what the run rates are, what margins we are pulling out of the account, etc. This is especially true when IT consulting has become so competitive with offshore resources. Nice screenshots. Well worth studying.

This is the client view:

Here is the internal IT consulting company management view. Note the colored arrows showing profitability:

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

These enterprise dashboard screenshots are hard to read, but worth squinting at. Thanks to the hard work of a well-placed Dashboard Spy at a major banking enterprise, we can see the screen flow for a wealth management client. We start off with the basics - Current asset mix, breakdown of accounts, client details, risk profile. Then the application moves across tabs into the Investment Planning tab which follows the investment framework of the bank. There is a checklist to follow which produces an Investment Profile and Plan. The screenshots even show the edit mode. Enjoy and, shh… don't tell anyone! 

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.