Three Questions to Help Triage Your Dashboards.
I’ve been helping someone recently whose organisation has been overwhelmed by “dashboards” — collections of KPIs, OKRs, and other Important Things that have accreted over time into an unmanageable mess (well… many unmanageable messes in this instance!)
Having hit this problem a few times in the past I’ve a quick and dirty checklist that seems to help when reviewing those big piles of pretty graphs and status signals.
First of all — is it visible at the right time? The entire point of a dashboard is that it should be in front of somebody at the point they need the information to make a decision.
I want to be looking at a product’s OKRs when we’re planning or reflecting on product work. I don’t want to discover things are off-track in a monthly status update. Often you get the business equivalent of an update on the speed of a car after the speeding ticket has arrived.
Getting information more often that you can act on it is just as wasteful. Are people getting daily updates, but only make decisions monthly (if at all)? This can sometimes be a signal that responsibility for action is getting lost somewhere.
