Reporting dashboards: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about reporting dashboards this quarter, make it the first item below.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Start here

A dashboard nobody opens is not a dashboard. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Then this

Fewer numbers, more clearly explained. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Eventually

Every metric should suggest an action. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How to tell if yours is fine

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Three things worth confirming about reporting dashboards before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A dashboard nobody opens is not a dashboard — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.