1–10 of 107 posts
If you'd be up for sharing some lessons / takeaways / challenges here, or even better, having a chat (I'll reach out) that would be amazing.
We'll of course fully attribute learnings / quotes etc.
You will often have to polish the users’ half-baked metrics. Even large orgs with teams of business analysts will leave gaps not uncovered till part way through build.
Answers don't just lead to Eureka moments, they lead to follow up questions and follow up questions.
Not a complaint - it's actually great. Just an observation (and a challenge)
- Everyone asks to translate simpler spreadsheets and Excel charts/graphs into dashboards in your BI tool of choice. As soon as it's there, they'll ask you why they can't export to manage the data themselves. This vicious cycle can sometimes be stopped but is a slow-motion drag on productivity in lots of orgs.
- Build in validations, and/or work on ways to check the dashboard. Dashboards sometimes put their builders and consumers on auto-pilot. The dashboard "must be right" but could easily have a bug or inaccuracy for weeks/months/etc. that isn't obvious without some external validation.
- The dashboard never has the "right" metrics - users will continue asking for changes. Be your best advocate and say no as a way of understanding the importance of the ask
- Related: always ask why about everything you're building into or modifying in dashboards. Business users often ask for things without an ounce of rationale.
- Related: taking away is harder than not doing at all!
Finally, I think most dashboards miss one fundamental point. Imagine you're the CEO/COO and you've got this beautiful 3 or 4-chart dashboard in front of you. What should you know about what you're seeing? What's the succinct summary?
I like building in spots to write 2-3 sentence executive summaries.
Are you talking about internal or external users?