Dashboards should only show the “most important” metrics… right?

I regularly hear complaints from dashboard creators that go something like this…

??? “My users consider dozens of metrics (or more) to be ‘KPIs’ and they want me to put them all on the dashboard.”

??? “My users don’t understand that, among all the metrics that we could show on the dashboard, only three to five of them are truly important. The rest are just noise that distract from the truly important numbers, and so don’t belong on the dashboard.”

Think about that for a second, though. Does it seem plausible that someone could run an entire team, department, or organization based on just five numbers?

In every organization in which I’ve ever taught or consulted, there were dozens of metrics (or more often, tens of thousands, once they’re segmented by region, business unit, etc.) that would genuinely require action if they went south. If those metrics aren’t on a dashboard somewhere, many problems in the organization will go unnoticed and bad things will happen.

When users ask for lots of numbers on their dashboard, then, maybe they’re being perfectly reasonable. Calling most of those numbers “unimportant” or “just noise,” however, maybe isn’t so reasonable. But how can we show that many numbers on a dashboard without it being visually overwhelming?

In my Practical Dashboards course , I recommend creating nine different types of dashboards for users, including a family of three dashboard types called "tactical monitoring dashboards.” These dashboards show a large number of metrics that are associated with a single role (CEO, account rep, etc.), area of the organization (marketing, call center #3, etc.), or “entity” (transactions, customers, etc.). Here’s an example of a “area” dashboard (the “Operations” area, in this example):

As you can see, it’s possible to show a large number of metrics without overwhelming users; the key is to build intelligence into the dashboard so that it automatically identifies and visually flags metrics that require attention. This allows users to instantly zero in on metrics that require attention (if there are any), so far more metrics can be included on the dashboard without it becoming overwhelming. In other words, we can show all potential problems, not just those that happen to impact four or five metrics. This isn’t easy to pull off (it takes about half of my 14-hour Practical Dashboards course to teach others how to do it), but it is possible.

This approach reflects the reality that, despite what many people believe, there’s never a handful of “truly important” metrics; there are only metrics that are important right now, and those change from one day/week/month to the next, so all potentially problematic metrics need to be on the dashboard.

Want to learn how to design dashboards like this? There are still seats remaining in my in-person workshop on Nov. 4-7 in London, U.K. Workshop info/registration page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nick-desbarats-practical-charts-practical-dashboards-tickets-981495037077

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