Performance Metrics Dashboard: Tools for Tracking and Monitoring Business KPIs

To develop a good and successful performance metrics dashboard you should go through and use these very simple and yet productive tips and make sure your performance dashboard really becomes your most effective management tool:

Step 1: Identify the particular objectives of your performance KPI dashboard

Before you start working on high-detail information you should step back and consider you business strategy, main goals and objectives and ask yourself what are the most important information I should be able to see in order to make better business decisions while improving productivity and efficiency.

Step 2: Figure out how your performance dashboard is going to target your objectives

Now that you have clearly defined what your most important information (business metrics and performance KPIs) are you can start defining the general objectives for your dashboard reporting. Creating a simple KPI list of your top business initiatives and projects is always a good start in dashboard development.

 

 

For each of the top key performance indicators identify the additional metrics you’ll need. In order to evaluate certain trends in your KPIs you’ll need to track the supporting performance metrics.

Step 3: Decide on the most effective types of executive reports to monitor your key performance indicators

At this point it is important to make a decision and chose the most effective types of dashboard reports you’ll use. For example, you can create one high level dashboard and generate additional supporting reports. You can also decide to use one higher density executive scorecard where you can see all your metrics on one page report. This saves time switching between reports and doesn’t require any additional work from the users.

Additional tips and tools for creating performance metrics dashboard:

Prior to creating your performance metrics dashboard, you should determine precisely what objective it is actually designed to handle and exactly how it is going to accomplish that. Without having these details, you are unable to track the proper information and satisfy the demands from the users.

To maintain your dashboards well organized, targeted and structured effectively you need to make use of individual dashboards for various functions and objectives. One example is, if you decide to concentrate on a particular group of functional goals like marketing, finance or sales, you can develop one particular dashboard for this goal.

Think about the following:

Your performance goals and objectives: What exactly is the function of your dashboard? Exactly what issues or concerns does it monitor?

Your operational performance objectives: In order to support your business improvements initiatives you can continuously monitor productivity, process performance, cost and efficiency by utilizing operational performance metrics.

Functional performance metrics: This is a very typical approach in dashboard creation where companies create dashboard for individual functions – examples typically include financial dashboard, sales dashboard, quality dashboard, marketing dashboard, safety dashboard, HR dashboard…

Users: It is important to consider who the current users are as well as the potential future users for your dashboard. A few meetings and interviews can reveal the real demand and requirements from various cross functional users which will drastically improve the effectiveness of the dashboard reports. This will define any potential or additional individual, team or department dashboard reporting needs.

Keep in mind that an effective dashboard provides details which are meant to express ideas instantly without the need of annoying you with information that you do not require. Basically, you need to be capable to grasp the interpretation from the information easily.

To create performance dashboard which is simple you need to create simple dashboard design from the very beginning which means avoiding too much details, figures, indicators and gauges. Executive style dashboard reports should be used in order to avoid any use of scroll bars, switching among many reports and make your reporting easy to print and use online as well as offline.

 

 

For example the excel dashboard allows you to see all of your performance metrics on one screen or print on paper as a one-page executive dashboard or scorecard report. Additionally users typically save the latest excel dashboard reports in PDF format and then they are able to email or share online the reports with others. PDF is a good media because it is supported by all operating systems and devices like smart phones, computers and tablets.

Use your excel dashboard to create as many professional performance metrics dashboard reports and make improvements to your business insight, decision making and productivity.

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