Utilizing Dashboards to Manage Your Team
Managing a team undertaking several activities is a daunting task for many companies. You spend most of your time monitoring the team’s deliverables but still find yourself missing critical details. Dashboards are essential tools for tracking and managing a project’s progression.
The tools monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and run metrics to offer insights into a company’s productivity. You access many features that help manage a team effectively and take project management to a new level.
The dashboards can be challenging to create because of many details and customized features to consider. You will be happy to know about platforms available online or, you could build your custom dashboard with an Excel expert.
You can hire Excel experts to customize the visual display of data that provides at-a-glance information on a project. Dashboards are useable for any project type, i.e., content creation, website analytics, operations, among others.
There are guidelines you can follow when creating and utilizing dashboards for managing your team. Such tips include:
Choose Your Indicators
To have meaningful visual data boards, choose the indicators you want to utilize to manage your team. For example, ask yourself if you need to analyze their timelines, sales goals, or productivity. Select the critical indicators that you need to monitor.
You can have multiple indicators but, be sure to prioritize the top ones to avoid too much clutter. Too much information on dashboards makes it confusing and, it will be counterproductive in discerning instant updates.
For the dashboards to be effective, be sure your team understands the indicator goals and what they should be focusing on most. You can focus on due dates, quantity/quality of deliverables, product specs, among other objectives. The goal descriptions should have an automatic check-off when met.
Make It Visually Appealing
A dashboard should be visually appealing and easy to digest. Bland boards are demotivating to the users and discourage frequent usage. When you struggle to find information quickly or find yourself having to explain it too much to others, you may need to redesign the look of your dashboard.
There are several ways to look at specific KPIs like graphs, tables, and charts. Play around with them to determine which type of visual is the best for you and your company. You can seek the opinion of potential users of the visuals on their preferences.
Colors and imagery also enhance the look and feel of the dashboards, appealing to the users. A slight tweak like celebration imagery upon the delivery of a milestone makes all the difference.
Run Specific Metrics
Company dashboards should go beyond generating basic information to churning out critical reports for the business. With a requisite backend setup, you can run specific metric reports to help you take a deeper dive into particular high-level KPIs.
Currently, organizations are transforming their data boards to business intelligence sources. The dashboards display/run various reports like net profit, net acquisition costs, revenue, etc. Relevant computations convert the raw data from dashboard users to insightful business reports.
You or someone at your company must understand how to run such reports, or else you will not reap the full benefits of a dashboard. Be thorough and detailed in the information you need to see in a report and exclude anything that is not necessary.
Keep it Updated
A dashboard should be up to date and automatically synced with specific data and progress reports related to the project it addresses. Failure to instantly update with the latest data renders the tool obsolete. Remember that the whole point of setting up the dashboard was to enhance efficiency.
Automating the process is an option but, you can also manually enter a lot into a dashboard if needed. Whichever software or programs your dashboard syncs with must also be up-to-date. You only need to ensure regular software upgrades to keep the tool in a prime working state.
Analyze the Big Picture
You can visualize the achievement of the organizational mission in the dashboards with a proper setup. The tools are for a top-down approach to management, informing leaders at the top on the current situation, enabling them to make decisions that affect the company direction.
Once you understand the goal metrics and areas that need improvement, you can create changes in your team to facilitate the enhancements. Root causes of process challenges are discernible from the dashboards, informing remedial actions.
To enhance monitoring effectiveness, keep a close eye on your KPIs and check your dashboard regularly to ensure you understand the status of your team and its progression. Correct any snag as soon as it appears to avoid a backlog of anomalies likely to cause projects to stall if unattended.
Visualize and Manage High Performing Teams
Managing teams and motivating them to deliver efficiently is every manager’s dream. However, it takes well-thought-out approaches to achieve such a noble goal. You can cut out much of the leg work by utilizing the dashboard, enhancing team performance. The tool eliminates the painstaking manual process of ensuring each person is on course with their work.
