Building dashboards is cowardly

Often dashboard creators are “outsiders” such as consultants, and they don’t have deep practitioner experience for understanding the entrenched issues within the company, such as the previous three issues. Therefore, they make common mistakes that lead to unactionable dashboards and a loss of credibility.

The folks who create dashboards live in a silo. They rarely go out and collect enough tribal knowledge to fully grasp the organizational actions behind the trends and patterns observed in the data being reported.

The best teams use dashboards to focus their collective attention on making the most important decisions and taking the most important actions, all at the right time. The underlying belief is that (1) at all times, certain conditions are reducing your project’s probability of success; (2) these conditions are sometimes difficult to detect; and (3)

Often dashboards are 28-tab Excel files or 34-slide PowerPoint decks. In either format, you track too many metrics and rarely segment and highlight performance, which makes it impossible for others to distill a cogent meaning from what happened and take action.