DASHBOARDS: A Gateway to Strategy & Continuous Improvement

Dashboards can be a very effective tool for continuous improvement and to drive transformation. Read on to find out.

I love improving the productivity and effectiveness of the team.?To do this, I strongly believe reports/dashboards make a huge impact in identifying and solving problems, improving performance, and building trust through transparency.?Dashboards are such critical tools for individuals (can help in taking elevator pitches),?leaders, managers, and for organizations.

Demonstrate your work through numbers wherever possible, even if your function is doing more qualitative work, brings a semblance of objectivity.?

If you don’t know where to start, you can always use the below markers to make progress:

1. From Raw Data
2. Categorize the data to your requirements and convert the same to information
3. Organize the information in form of, for example, Geography, Service-Lines, Verticals, Clients, Project-wise, $, etc (you may customize as per your requirements)
4. Deliver the Final Report in the form of a Dashboard

?Once you accomplish this, sifting through becomes easy and you will get a bird’s eye view of the gaps and quantum of work. Follow through with the below steps:

1. ?Infer: Infer the report to identify the blind spots.?
2. Strategy: Work on blind spots by strategizing on the gaps which came out from your inference.
3. Action: Once you have identified the gaps and improvement areas, have a clear action plan, along with a work breakdown structure, and target dates for closures owning/assigning accountability.
4. Execute the action: Measure the status periodically to ensure actions are being delivered as planned.
5. Result: Measure the outcome
6. Repeating these steps continually will eventually transform the way we strategize, execute, and govern.

Thus, a Dashboard can not only help in communicating more objectively to your audience, but it can also help you to identify blind spots, thereby enabling strategizing more effectively and creating follow-up actions for continuous improvement.

As Daniel H. Pink said, Mastery is an asymptote! Keep improving and strive to be the best!