What to ask your agency about reporting dashboards

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on reporting dashboards, these questions are worth asking early.

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.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A dashboard nobody opens is not a dashboard. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Every metric should suggest an action. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

How to tell if yours is fine

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Three things worth confirming about reporting dashboards before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every metric should suggest an action — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.