Reporting dashboards: the questions we get asked most

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. The questions about reporting dashboards that come up most often on our calls.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Do we need to care about this?

A dashboard nobody opens is not a dashboard. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How do we know it is working?

Every metric should suggest an action. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about reporting dashboards before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Fewer numbers, more clearly explained — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.