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What is a dashboard?
Term dashboard originated from the automobile dashboard where the driver can see the vital statistics of the vehicle (speed, fuel meter, indicators, safety lights etc.). It’s difficult to imagine a car without a dashboard – impossible, right. So, imagine the plight of an organization which is running without a dashboard.
From a business perspective dashboard is a graphical user interface which provides a quick crisp view of how the business is performing. Visual illustration of numbers in the form of charts, enabling the user to capture the essence of the information in a quick glance. It can be created at multiple levels basis the need of the end user for example –
- CEO’s dashboard would indicate how is business is performing, which business units are doing well, which not so well, customer feedback levels etc.
- Sales & marketing head’s dashboard will typically indicate the sales performance of different product segments, geographical areas/zones, sales quotas of different teams etc.
- Head of finance could have a dashboard indicating – amount of funds accessible to the company, account receivables, account payables, current stock price of the company, financial ratios etc.
- HR head for that matter would be viewing the total headcounts in the company, the bench strength, attrition rates, new requirements in pipeline by different BU’s etc. as some of the key metrics in their dashboard.
Why dashboards?
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it – Peter Drucker.
A big part of Management is purely scientific and hence it relies on numbers. So, having right dashboards help in monitoring the impact of change initiatives, understanding in real time basis what’s working and which parts need more attention, fixing. Sharing some key benefits below –
- Save time and build laser focus
Gives you easy access to the data of the entire team so you can be on top of the deliverables. Setting up real time dashboards helps in keeping a track of the progress of various initiatives, projects running across departments. Having such a structured top down approach lets you prioritize and address the issues which really matter.
- Short-circuiting the decision making process.
Eliminates the need for manually searching the important numbers across different sheets at the end of the week/month or quarter. This further allows you to spend time to dig deeper into the underlying story, understand the customer behavior, insights and the subtle shifts arising in the business over time.
- Data room or repository
Modern day dashboards provide a lot of flexibility in connecting a variety of data sources (APIs, CRMs, in-built integrations etc.). These functionalities allow you to create a data room or repository which becomes extremely handy at the time of investor engagements and due diligence exercises.
- Data driven decision making
Dashboards are one of the biggest foundation blocks for instilling a data driven approach to decision making in the organization and helps in switching the mindset to data vs guessing, gut feeling across teams.
Operations of any start-up are constantly evolving and dashboards can provide early warning signs if operations are not going as per the plan. Leaders of any organization are constantly juggling with multiple competing priorities. And often the urgent issues (but low importance) take priority and strategically important issues take a back seat. These overlooked priorities often result in an unforeseen blow to business over a period of time. Big organization with access to resources but for a start-up this can lead to complete washout of the business operations. So building the right business specific dashboards is a highly productive exercise which is extremely beneficial for any organization – especially for a start-up.
Author: Nikhil Gupta
[Email: nikhil@minervagc.com]