Dashboards & Reporting cookbook

9 recipes · 57 steps · about 53 minutes of reading

Trim a dashboard to the KPIs a manager checks
Forty tiles, and nobody looks twice.
BeginnerRead 5 minDoing: one afternoon for the audit and rebuild, plus a short check-in with the manager to sign off6 steps
Give every dashboard KPI a target, an owner, and a trend line
Revenue: $4.2M sits on the screen every single morning. Nobody in the room can say whether that number is good, bad, or completely meaningless.
Beginner to intermediateRead 5 minDoing: an afternoon6 steps
Rebuilding a refresh schedule that keeps burning your team's trust
The numbers looked fine, until someone in Monday's meeting noticed they were stale.
Beginner to intermediateRead 6 minDoing: an hour or two to move the schedule and set up the alert, plus a few minutes at the next meeting to say what changed6 steps
Replace hourly KPI checking with one threshold alert
Why do I keep refreshing the same tile by hand?
IntermediateRead 5 minDoing: an afternoon6 steps
Pick a colorblind-safe palette for dashboard status
He can't tell your red bars from the green ones.
IntermediateRead 6 minDoing: one afternoon to swap the palette, add the redundant cues, and run all three checks6 steps
Filter one dashboard instead of cloning it for every audience
Sales wants the West region only. Finance wants revenue with no regional breakdown at all. Somehow I've ended up maintaining five near-identical dashboards for five different requests.
IntermediateRead 6 minDoing: a day7 steps
Automate a weekly export you still send by hand
Same file, same six people, every Friday.
IntermediateRead 5 minDoing: an afternoon to build and test the flow, plus a couple of minutes each of the next two Fridays to check it landed5 steps
A desktop dashboard that turns unreadable on a phone screen
It looked perfect on your monitor, and now it's a blur on someone's phone before their meeting.
Intermediate to advancedRead 7 minDoing: an afternoon, longer if the current dashboard has a lot of tiles to sort through7 steps
Which dashboards can finally be retired?
There are eleven dashboards named "Sales Overview" scattered across the shared drive, and nobody remembers which one is right.
AdvancedRead 8 minDoing: a full workday for the audit and the write-up, longer if the dashboard count runs past a couple dozen8 steps

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Dashboards & Reporting cookbook

Trim a dashboard to the KPIs a manager checks

Give every dashboard KPI a target, an owner, and a trend line

Rebuilding a refresh schedule that keeps burning your team's trust

Replace hourly KPI checking with one threshold alert

Pick a colorblind-safe palette for dashboard status

Filter one dashboard instead of cloning it for every audience

Automate a weekly export you still send by hand

A desktop dashboard that turns unreadable on a phone screen

Which dashboards can finally be retired?

In these roadmaps

Dashboards & Reporting cookbook

Trim a dashboard to the KPIs a manager checks

Give every dashboard KPI a target, an owner, and a trend line

Rebuilding a refresh schedule that keeps burning your team's trust

Replace hourly KPI checking with one threshold alert

Pick a colorblind-safe palette for dashboard status

Filter one dashboard instead of cloning it for every audience

Automate a weekly export you still send by hand

A desktop dashboard that turns unreadable on a phone screen

Which dashboards can finally be retired?

In these roadmaps