One of the biggest complaints that we hear from our clients is how tedious, time-consuming, and sometimes even impossible it can be to try to get a daily or real-time grasp on whether the assets, projects, business units, and employees they manage are performing as expected against their business goals. They’re having to pull numbers out of tools like Excel or Project for each individual project, then bring all that data together to start analyzing it with complex formulas, lookups, and VBA macros. That kind of thing can take hours, so you typically wouldn’t want to do it every single day.
We actually ran into the same problem here at Entrance. Without a daily management ritual to track performance to plan, things can spiral out of control very quickly, and top performers don’t get the credit they deserve. When we turned to address the problem, we found that using visualization technologies like Spotfire and Tableau to create management dashboards made it much easier for us to keep an eye on performance to plan KPIs in our day-to-day business.
Here’s an example:
We have a high-level view of how we are tracking overall by giving us one big, color-coded block that features our high-level KPI metrics. In this case, we’re doing very well, so the block is green. It doesn’t get any easier than this to understand whether we’re meeting our biggest goals.
Beside the green color block, we can also see under- and over-performing outliers on either end of the spectrum, with two charts that list the top and bottom ten performers. This allows us to manage our staff and projects by exception, so we can focus time and energy on the things that are at highest risk for failure.
The bottom line graph demonstrates a pattern of how our projects have been progressing over time. Did someone/something just have an off week, or have they been trending down for the past few periods?
Of course, as a services team, we use this dashboard to track billable hours for our projects, but this could be used as part of any project/process regiment. You could manage software projects, you could see how production of different physical products is tracking, or you could even use it to see how much waste you generate to make sure you’re falling within regular tolerances.
If this seems like something that you could use, but you’re not sure how to get started on it, send me a note using the form on the right, and I’ll be happy to talk to you about how to set this up.