W. Edwards Deming once stated, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This very true when one is looking to increase their company’s work efficiency. In the workplace, there is a lot on the go and for managers especially, it can be difficult to determine “What is succeeding?” and “What needs to be improved?”. Although, with the assistance of project management dashboards, many managers can easily access analytics based on their team’s operational efficiency.
Being able to measure and visually see key areas in your business, you can analyze what areas are performing well and some that need work. Identifying where your company is lacking in projects, allows managers to evaluate the problem, which can ameliorate these areas. Dashboards are definitely a needed asset that serves many benefits to a business. Ultimately, the big question is “How can you maximize this software, so it helps your company in the most useful way?”.
Many times, businesses do not choose the right key performance indicators (KPI) which can lead to useless information collected, allowing no insight on what needs to be improved and what projects are progressing well. To avoid this hassle, you must choose the correct KPI’s that will help give the right data to quantify the progress of the success of the business. This can be done by, first, identifying the goals and objectives your business wishes to accomplish. Example- Decrease customer service calls, by improving the online help centre. Next, you must choose which factors will present information on how well you are acceding these objectives according to the data scale. These are known as Critical Success Factors (CSF), and focus on how a business plans to achieve their objectives. To add to our example CSF’s could include the number of visits on the help centre website or the number of calls to customer service lines. Once this is done, KPIs will collect useful data and analyze the effectiveness of the activities and whether your company was successful at its objectives.
You now have very well collected data from your objectives, based on a timespan that fits your company’s needs, this can be either: daily, weekly or maybe monthly. Managers need to organize their dashboards, picking the best visual representation of the data. You can pick from a variety of options: graphs, tables, charts or gauges. This can express daily business achievement; plotting the data collected. Managers can analyze these visuals and pinpoint the areas that are not doing as well. To utilize this data in a beneficial way, managers can hold weekly meetings with their teams discussing their weekly performance. This helps visually and vocally communicate to you and your workers what is going well and what needs work. Here the workers can communicate to one another the reasons they may be not achieving the set objectives and brainstorm solutions to improve the negative data and change it to positive data. Managers should encourage their teams to go above and beyond, to motivate them to continue succeeding in the areas they are performing well while trying to turn around the negative trends shown in the data.
If you can manage to accomplish the previous requirements you’re on the way to improving your business and have optimized your project management dashboard. Dashboards help calculate the data analyzing how well your business is doing in key areas. This is crucial information that can help grow a business to higher success. It also helps managers see where the company is lacking and allows them to gather with teams to calculate a solution as to how they can improve their drawbacks. Overall, dashboards are very valuable to businesses, especially when they’re utilized in the best way!