Manage your business with Key Performance Indicators for Growth. My #7 principles.

Everyone has heard about key performance indicators – measures which give you a brief understanding of how your business operates and creates value for customers. Three essentials that each CEO is watching are revenue growth, costs and cash flow. But those KPIs are on the top of the iceberg. Underneath there are many other, much more strategic KPIs which can be revealed and can serve as a lighthouse to help you sail on restless seas and oceans to strengthen your resilience and reduce vulnerability. But the key question here is how to find them.

Have you heard about the concept of a strategy map? The strategy map is a simple visual tool that helps you decompose strategy objectives like “cost reduction by 5%” into smaller and manageable ones like “waiting time reduction by 3%”. It presents logical, cause-and-effect relations between objectives and clarifies the value stream through domains like finance, production, people, technology etc. The power of this tool is to present business strategy on a very tangible level and what is more, provide a transparent way to achieve it.

https://balancedscorecard.org/bsc-basics/what-is-a-strategy-map/

However, you will not be able to control your objectives without proper measures. Those measures we call Key Performance Indicators – KPIs. Below I am presenting my top seven principles for KPIs that must be met.

KPIs are like a compass

Do you have your strategic objectives already shaped? Wonderful. Do you know how to measure them for driving growth? Each of the established objectives should be followed by one well-defined and tailored KPI. I would be far from creating various KPIs for one objective and then linking them for making sense of it. Simplification is a buzzword here for not losing crucial metrics from your radar.  Too many will only distract you and blur the straight interpretation.

KPIs reflect business dynamics

The next thing worth remembering about KPIs is that they must be dynamic. KPI which doesn’t change frequently is totally useless, especially in a fast-moving business environment. Your resilience is as good as you can react to appearing obstacles and disruption. Ideally, you should be able to track progress daily to make adequate decisions.

KPIs are standardized across the organization

Standardization is your ally to ensure that people are looking from the same perspective or seeing the same picture. Keep handy, for all users, KPIs’ descriptions, and examples of how they can leverage them at work to improve performance. Due that people within your organization can use a common language and easily discuss chances and challenges in achieving similar results.

KPIs show what “good enough” means

Maybe it is not very political, but targets or goals should not be stretched. They should be realistic. Maybe you would say that to be successful you must be very ambitious, but frequent setbacks might have a very negative influence on your and others’ motivation (read more about the topic in my previous post). The experience of achieving goals strengthens people’s confidence, which might flourish as an improvement for future performance.

KPIs are easily accessible

If you want people to start using a specific tool or device, you do not hide it, do you? On the market, there are plenty of reporting platforms or software that can provide people with direct and easy access to information. Links to those tools should be placed on the intranet in a visible place. In addition, the information about reporting system should be included within onboarding materials.

KPIs are communicated

Sounds obvious, right? Often, it is not. Many times, even though we have KPIs and strategies in place, our employees are not aware of them. Some ideas stay on the management level, and they are not cascaded down. Regarding the strategy and goals, the organization should keep in the loop all employees, because everyone participates in its growth, and everyone is needed to create a value stream for customers. Because success is nothing more like the sum of small efforts and small steps achieve daily by individuals.

KPIs are used on daily basis.

Last but not least. Finally, people must feel the benefit of checking KPIs daily in making better decisions and choices. This is the hardest part of the entire process. Changing people’s habits and behaviours is not piece of cake (here you will find some strategies for change management). Design processes in a way to force people to use KPIs. Otherwise, you can spend billions on developing a new strategy and implementing new technology, and all those efforts would be a waste, just because nobody is interested in using it.

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How a daily dashboard can boost the motivation of your team.

I learnt a new concept – inner work life. Inner work life is the confluence of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (read an interview with authors) did research on 238 employees in 7 companies and studied nearly 12 000 diary entries to find out how a mix of daily mood, emotions, self-perception, and interactions with other people in an organization can influence progress at work. The results of research and strategies for managers are described in the authors’ book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work”.

Many managers try to solve the puzzle of how to boost the motivation of their subordinates. Many employees struggle with their own demotivation and lack of engagement which ruins their sense of purpose. Research shows that there are two main triggers that influence positive inner work life – progress and setbacks. Even small daily progress at work has a tremendous positive impact on our mood and motivation at work that can last for a few days, however, it is a double-edged sword. Small losses or setbacks can have negative effects. Nevertheless, except for those triggers to maintain positive inner work life, people need additional stimulants called by the authors: catalysts and nourishers. Catalysts are actions that directly support work like proper tools, help from colleagues or well-designed processes. Nourishes relate to interpersonal interactions like getting respect and recognition and being encouraged by managers or colleagues. But those stimulants don’t have a such critical influence on bad vs good mood day as an experience of progress or setbacks (more to read about research result).

Now we know the concept of inner work life in a nutshell. This concept is much more important for jobs where people have to deal with complex tasks and need to leverage their problem-solving skills or rely on their creativity. Of course, there are jobs where this idea can be hard to implement for instance in easy repeatable work, but I believe that in such cases introducing some elements of concepts can significantly impact the quality of the work and people’s well-being. However, before we can benefit from positive inner work life as an organization and individuals, we must rethink how do we understand progress and which tools we would like to use to track it.

How the power of progress can be leveraged in organizations

Establish what progress means for you and your team

Many of us see progress as something like a milestone, a tremendous change from one state to another underestimating small changes which in fact summarize into those larger ones. But exactly those small daily steps bring us closer to achieving the most ambitious goals. To run a marathon, first of all, you must put your shoes on and step out of your house. Many organizations are too focused on their goals, and they are forgetting about the road that leads to goals. But in fact, that road enables those organizations to learn and grow.

Chunk long-term KPIs into manageable pieces

Another thing to be concerned about is how goals are defined in the organization. Of course, there are annual goals, which from the bottom of the organization can be seemed as abstract and hard to achieve. To make them more tangible for employees, they should be chunked into small, manageable pieces. For instant. It’s great to have an annual sales goal of $2mln but to hit this target each employee must at least calls 10 clients per day. Those daily calls can be treated as progress.  

Plan work in daily iterations

If your organization works in weekly cycles, shifting toward finishing daily tasks will be a challenge. Especially when you must change the behaviour of planning. Planning daily tasks is more demanding because you must think deeply about what you can do and when, what should be done first, and which tasks are critical or can occur as bottlenecks. It is much easier to set weekly or monthly goals and then pray to accomplish them. Someone would say that such granularity is micromanagement. But the devil is in the details. Those tasks should be prepared by the team, not by the manager.  People should have the autonomy to plan their own work and feel responsible for the plan execution.  Otherwise, the power of progress won’t work.

Use the Kanban board to track and visualize progress daily

One of the great tools that show how teams and individuals are moving forward is Kanban Board.  Kanban board is widely used in any type of industry, where some products are produced like in manufacturing or IT. But there is nothing against leveraging it for other fields like HR or even accounting. This board is designed to visualise workflow to identify and limit work in progress. The secret of this tool is its simplicity. The board consists of a minimum of three columns: to-do, doing, and done, where tasks are moved from left to right to show progress and help perform a work (more on Kanban Board). The huge power of this board is to give team members the physical ability to move their own tasks forward from to-do to doing, from doing to done. It creates in people a true sense of accomplishment when they can see in front of their eyes how tasks are getting status done.

Remove obstacles and toxins

Ok, we can see with our eyes of imagination how we are moving tasks on board without any interference, but it is not a reality. Most of the time during the day we must struggle with many obstacles like not responsive people, irrational procedures or not working processes and tools. It is even worse when the success of our tasks depends on others’ work, and whether we want it or not, we need to wait for their availability. All of those can in a magician’s way turn progress into setbacks. Setbacks can be more powerful than progress because of their dark nature of experience. Managers should be aware of that force and support their subordinates to solve those issues to reduce as much as possible any frustration. Longer setbacks weaker people’s motivation and lead to a negative inner work life that destroys someone’s efficiency.

Celebrate daily progress

How about starting a new brand day with recognition for yesterday? If you made yesterday’s progress, why not celebrate it? For that, you can introduce a daily stand-up meeting, when you share with a team yesterday’s achievements, ideally in some visualized form. Present such metrics as won deals, new prospects, number of processed documents or produced products, created new ideas for marketing campaigns or resolved incidents. Anything that is meaningful for your team and can represent their engagement in work.

Leverage data

Most of the data which can serve you for this purpose are already available. Currently, most organizations don’t have issues with obtaining data but with making sense of them. You just need to ask yourself and your team, what should be displayed on the daily dashboard? What are the main factors or triggers that give them sense of purpose, generate progress, and bring them closer to achieving committed goals? What data they would like to see because they can alert them that things are getting out of track?

Principles of the daily dashboard for progress tracking

Focus on daily tasks

If your team supports customers’ incidents maybe, they are not interested in the first place what is a customer satisfaction rate but for sure they are interested in how many incidents were resolved and in which handle time. Customer satisfaction rate can be displayed as beside metric, which gives them sense of purpose and shows the direct impact of their work. But, essential for them are their own tasks, that are mentioned in the job description, because at the end of the day they will be accounted for them.

Design dynamic KPIs and goals

I’m static poses lover as practising yoga is one of the key elements of my lifestyle. However, many do not share my passion. If you want to use KPIs (key performance indicators) as a tool that helps you monitor daily work and makes better decisions, those metrics should be designed to reflect changes on a daily basis if possible. We must keep common sense in here, of course. If work is in weekly cycles, we won’t be able to present any accomplishments during the week, but it doesn’t mean that we can not display progress. Maybe we can present how many issues were open during the day? Or maybe we can present how many of them moved into another status? With that approach, we can track how our work is moving from one point to another and have a chance to notice any blocks or unwanted behaviours.

Design daily benchmarks

Where possible, I encourage creating and using benchmarks. This reference point can act as an alert or goal and its evaluation provides meaningful information about the quality and performance of your work. This benchmark can be designed based on the average performance of previous days or weeks or established as the desired goal.

Show critical alerts

What should be included on a daily dashboard, in addition to progress, are metrics monitoring critical processes. Many companies have commitments that translate into specific actions. One such is, for example, the SLA (service level agreement). Most of us have experienced those SLAs when complaining or returning a product to an online shop. In both cases, the deadline for consideration of the complaint and the return of funds is agreed upon. Look for those critical KPIs and don’t miss them from your radar.

Create positive narration

Last but not least, remember to design a daily dashboard in a manner to boost people’s motivation not the opposite. Focus more on team effort than individual performance (see my post about the cooperative vs. competitive approach). Try not to overwhelm them with details. They should see a clear path to their success. Give them actionable metrics which can be managed and improved by the team. Most people like to feel that they are sitting behind the driving wheel.

Can reporting influence the cooperative vs. competitive culture in organizations?

I’m continually amazed when I hear about the importance of building cooperative culture and what I can mostly see is still reinforcement of a competitive one.

New trends across all industries are putting more stress on promoting employees’ team-player characteristics and glueing the teams for better outcomes. There are many talks inside and outside companies about building such an attitude. The shift in mindset is mainly required on the leadership level where change can be driven and cascade to the rest parts of the organization.

Why leaders should care more about cooperative culture?

The aggressive competitive culture for many years was recognized for delivering overperformance results, but the question is it in fact true? Why promoting individuals over entire teams is the better strategy for the company? Most companies have common goals and vision, and they strive to make any single employee shares those principles. Does it not sound like one huge team of people who must collaborate to achieve one goal? So why do managers on lower levels often act differently and throw people into competitive situations?

Once, one of the managers told me that employees like to compete and this is how they are driven to be better at work, but I remember that team mostly as frustrated and surly people. Of course, we hold the competitiveness in our nature. We compete with our peers for better jobs or with co-workers for a rise or promotion. But looking from a helicopter view, I am questioning its positive impact from the company’s growth perspective. To illustrate this, imagine a soccer team. You can have one or two spectacular stars, but you need eleven players to win a game. Even those two superstars will not win a game for you. You need the effort from the rest of the group. What is more, your team is just as strong as the weakest player. And here we are touching on the pros of a cooperative attitude.

What makes cooperation better than the competition?

I worked in many industries and companies with different cultures, and I can honestly admit that the more stress was put on collaboration, the better memories I have about the atmosphere and delivered results. Of course, some people may raise their voices that if you did not track individuals’ progress, people would be tempted to cheat and not put in as much effort as they could. But my point is not against tracking individuals’ progress for people management purposes, just not presenting those statistics to the team.

Learning from others

The undoubted advantage of a strong collaboration approach is the overall greater capability of the whole team as a group due to sharing between them best practices. To translate for the business purpose an old proverb that says you need an entire village to raise a child, people can learn from other experiences and discuss with colleagues how to approach problematic clients. They can even participate together in meetings with clients just to observe the behaviours and responses of more experienced colleagues. Learning on the job has been proven to be the fastest way for people to acquire new skills or master existing ones. Sharing knowledge would be beneficial for all, younger and more senior members, while younger can exchange their energy and fresh look on things with balanced manners of seniors.

Supportive environment

Many times, private life interrupts professional. You can be accidentally sick just before closing a deal with your key client, or you immediately must be on the second end of the country to help your parents with their health problems. As we are all humans and most of our business partners will understand the situation, in consequence, the business processes will be on hold. Would not you feel much calmer knowing that in your absence your cases are moved forward, and customers are still pleased? And what about solving problems? How to leverage brainstorming sessions if people have in the back of their heads that they should not reveal their best ideas? To maximize outcomes you need to build trust. Trust will not grow in a competitive environment.

Business continuity

Both above-mentioned potential advantages are crucial to ensure business continuity. Just think how the image of your company would suffer in the eyes of your customer if you can not replace smoothly the employee who suddenly got sick for a longer time.  As a manager, one of your goals is to mitigate risks and make sure that all your processes are covered and fully operated. Having a group of people with similar skills and knowledge is a guarantee of stability from the company’s point of view.

What role does the reporting play here?

The reporting reflects vision, strategy, expectations, and corporate aspiration or at least should. If your reports do not provide supportive information to drive a business, it literally sucks, and you should do homework on how to force your data to work for you. However, before you leverage data, you must think about what message you would like to convey.

I’m always emphasising that by having the same data set you can tell several different stories and draw other conclusions. The factor here is a perspective and an end goal. The management must ask themselves if they would like to support a culture that creates stars that can shine very brightly but for a relatively short period or prefer to invest in a team which takes part in relay-race and win together.

To depict how we can promote cooperative or competitive culture by reporting tool let us compare the two below sketches (BTW, sketching is a great tool when you are working with clients, but it is a good topic for the next post).

More competitive dashboard

• Design the dashboard for a sake of the possibility to compare team members’ performance.
• Create an overall ranking where you can present the undisputed leader of the race.
• Colour laggards in red or orange to emphasize them even more.
• Keep records daily to present the progress and gaps of each team member to the leader. You can even present the historical dynamics of the race.
• Display dashboard on a wall screen.
• Keep a record of the best performers from previous months on the Wall of Glory.

More cooperative dashboard

• Forget about individual performance. Focus on the Team performance.
• You can use natural competition drivers toward other groups like teams from the same department but serving other markets, teams from different departments or if you have an opportunity towards your market competitors. Show them a common “enemy” to reinforce them as a group.
• Show the team’s current progress in comparison to goals or targets.
• Highlight “good news” like positive growth of KPIs or faster pace of attaining the target.
• Display the daily progress to emphasise and award daily work.
• If your company culture is promoting giving KUDOS present them on the dashboard. That great recognition from peers for someone’s hard work shouldn’t be unnoticed.

I have only scratched a surface of the topic, but whatever approach is closer to your HR strategy remember that how you use, and display data will amplify some underlying behaviours and attitudes.  For organizations that aspirate to be data-driven, there is no escape from thinking about data at a strategic level and using them to serve specific purposes.

Make more impact by empowering your one-to-one meetings with data.

COVID-19 was a game changer regarding our ways of working. Many companies were forced to change a typical on-site work style for remote work. That shift had pros and cons like everything does. On the pros surveys reveal better work-life balance, commuting time savings, or performance increase. On the other hand, managers notice risks in a higher rate of employees leaving. One of the biggest cons of remote work is that employees lose attachment with the company. The main reason is a lack of social interaction with peers and involvement in creating specific organisational culture. But the second is weak identification with the brand that often relates to the office and office events. Managers are brainstorming how to bring back people again to the offices and gain their loyalty, but in the post-pandemic world, it is not so obvious how to achieve it. Rules changed and nothing remains the same as it was.

I believe that everyone needs to feel purpose in life and feel that his work is meaningful. For me understanding how I contribute to the overall strategy, goals or company’s vision is essential. Many times, we lack those connections because of poor communication from the management side and a vague understanding of our role in the entire organization. Fortunately, we have a bunch of communication tools that can be used to improve mutual understanding and keep employees satisfied with their positions.

One of those I find helpful is one-to-one conversations. The one-to-one conversation has great potential in tracking performance, and most of the time they are only used for that. But what is much more important is having a deep and honest discussion with employees about their thoughts, sentiments, and aspirations. That knowledge gives managers the opportunity to react fast when a loss in interest is observed. However, be honest with yourself, how often do you have a feeling that your one-to-ones are not effective as they could be? What are they still missing?

From my long record, I rarely recall that those discussions were supported by some good information. In the majority, discussions were driven by opinions rather than facts. Wouldn’t be great to have evidence for our gut feelings? That precious time is too often wasted simply because companies don’t provide adequate tools to make those meetings more valuable and beneficial for organisations, managers, and employees. Writing “tools”, means collecting, analysing, transforming, and presenting relevant data to make sure that people are talking about facts, and not opinions. And yes, nothing stands in the way to use data for one-to-one meetings.

Of course, the selection of data and KPIs will differ across industries, businesses, and roles. However, some of those remain the same. The biggest challenge is asking the right questions and finding data that respond to them. The great starting point in the journey of creating KPIs that give you meaningful data-based one-to-one conversations are:

1. Company strategy & goals,
2. And the job description.

Company strategy &goals

As I wrote above, people like to feel purpose and connection. Why not use a narrative from the big picture down to the bottom and show employees how does he or she participate in the company’s growth? The more tangible connections between the employee’s daily work and the company’s performance you can find, the higher satisfaction the employee can have. Most organizations cascade down their goals. Thanks to that, we can simply provide proper KPIs and data visualizations to present departments, teams, or individuals’ contributions.

So, before the next one-to-one, if you do not do it already, would be good to talk with the business intelligence team, the sales team, or the finance team to get some shareable data about the business growth and current progress toward goals and the contribution share of your team.

Job description

The job description includes all expectations toward a specific role that can be converted into questions tracked by data. Typically, the job description has two parts that we can use for our purpose. First are responsibilities, second qualifications and skills. Responsibilities can shape our questions about current performance toward goals, finding challenges and their proper solutions or give us a clue on how to prioritise hot issues. Qualifications and skills are a great introduction to talk about employee directions of development, their ambitions and future career paths.

Business case

As a business case, I’ll use the Product Owner role. Depending on the industry’s and an organization’s characteristics main responsibilities, qualifications and skills can differ. However, for the purpose of this post, I’m picking those:

• Develops, owns, and executes product roadmap.
• Prioritizes and maintains the sprint backlog for assigned products, balancing the requirements of stakeholders.
• Translates product roadmap features into well-defined product requirements including features, user stories, and acceptance test criteria.

Expectations reflected in data

The product roadmap is one of the key drivers of success in delivering products. Without a strong and clear vision of what the product is and which characteristics and functionalities it has, it would be hard to develop anything. As a Product Owner, you should often review and update the roadmap to make sure that the vision of the product still reflects the market demands. On the other hand, the product roadmap is a base for the product backlog that consists of features or /and user stories that workload estimation gives the Product Owner a feeling about timely delivery. So, what kind of KPIs should we track to make sure that the roadmap is still valid?

Do all milestones are on the product roadmap?

The product roadmap usually includes milestones or bigger chunks that are broken down into smaller pieces like features and user stories. Tracking something that is not visible is a complicated task. Having one big picture of what is planned gives you the opportunity for proactive conversation. Having the possibility to see all relevant tasks for each milestone makes you ensure that you didn’t forget anything highly important.

Does the product backlog cover the product roadmap?

The first measure that could be interesting to track is the number of tasks under each milestone. The alert could be set up for those milestones without any created tasks. If you have the possibility to track the progress of the task, it gives you a feeling that pace of work is aligned with assumptions or is it faster or slower. You can then discuss options.

Do we have enough resources to deliver the agreed functionalities on time?

Time and money are always tied together. Looking at the roadmap we need to guess somehow the amount of work that is needed for development. For that, we can use story points, or man-days, or any other measure that allows us to compare team capabilities with the required workload. As a result, we can have a positive or negative gap. We wouldn’t trouble ourselves too much as long as we had a positive gap, but the questions would arise with a negative one. Should we narrow the scope or maybe find other people to help us?

Do features/user stories well-prepared for developers?

This question can reveal if tasks for developers are ready for development, or if some issues must be clarified still. We can use here RAG (Red for not ready, Amber for those in progress, Green for those that are ready) approach that gives us the status of tasks’ readiness. This status review opens a discussion about issues and challenges on a very low level that in the end can have a tremendous effect on the entire product development. To create RAG status, think about the most important entries, or fields on your feature/user story template. Then you can use a simple sum or a weighted one to calculate the indicator. Add conditions to differentiate between red, amber, and green (or not ready, in progress, ready). Now you have KPI to see which task needs more of your attention or has some issues to address.

To track these data, you do not even need fancy tools. The Excel spreadsheet will work perfectly. Of course, if you have the possibility to use more advanced business intelligence tools, please do not hesitate 😊

Addressing aspirations and ambitions

Most people I have known have their own aspirations and desires regarding professional and private life. Most of them if they cannot fulfil them in the current workplace are starting to look around for more favourable conditions. That is why the manager should remember to leave enough space for one-to-one conversations for discussing topics regarding employee growth. But again, the discussion is an exchange of opinions. Can we find some data to visualise how much time and effort is spent on learning and mastering skills activities?

More and more companies offer their employees learning platforms just to name a few Udemy, Coursera, and EDX. They are perceived as tremendous benefits by employees but only when they are allowed to allocate some time for learning. In the interest of any organization should be staff development. It has so many positive aspects for both sides, the employer, and the employees. I have an experience among organizations which had entirely different approaches to peoples’ growth. Some of them didn’t care at all about these needs, some of them gave the opportunity to learn but after working hours, some of them understood it as an investment and some of them required upskilling but without providing any courses or giving room for learning. But it totally different topic.

My point is that if you have such platforms in your organizations, maybe you can leverage them for:

• Verify together with your subordinate which courses would be relevant for mastering skills required in her/his position,
• Prepare together learning path,
• Agree on timelines,
• Allocate time per day/week/month for learning.

Most learning platforms share data or even provide built-in reports about users’ activity like a list of chosen training, amount of time spent in the application and on training, or progress on lecturer or practical activities. Isn’t it a great mine of information? Armed with such knowledge we can bring to the table tangible insights and have a proper conversation about employee growth. What we can definitely review in the first place is whether a person has the opportunity to use the dedicated time for learning or is snowed under with daily tasks. Or the exact opposite if you are sure that a person is not overloaded with work why she or he doesn’t take classes as is agreed? Another point for discussion can be reviewing new learnings and figuring out how this fresh knowledge can be applied to business, or if the subject is still relevant or should be changed. As you can see having those data we can start even think more strategically about the development of teams, departments, and entire organizations.

The above examples are only a small sample of enriching one of the processes within the organization. The huge challenge in making organizations data-driven is to design relative key performance indicators and create a habit of using them unconsciously by people. The main strategy to achieve that is simply to weave data into almost every process. The result can be that employees won’t think about data as something separately but as an integral step for achieving their goals. Establishing that common culture in the organization will support gaining market advantage like never before.

The doom of pre-defined dashboards. True or false?

A few days ago, I read an article¹ about trends for 2022 in data analytics. One of the opinions paid my attention more than the rest. The thesis was that in 2022 we can observe “the death of predefined dashboards” which sounds odd to me.

Maybe it is only some kind of over-interpretation of what is happening in the industries and an attempt to call it controversially. Nevertheless, decision-makers can take it for granted and start a revolution in organisations harming analytical processes, workflows and widely understood data culture.

Let me touch more deeply on why I bare such an opinion.

The case with data literacy

I would love to see legions of employees who are able to read, interpret and work with data fluently at every level of the company’s hierarchy. But we are not there yet, as all surveys of all consulting companies show us.

For years we have been observing how companies have been putting a large focus on data democratization. The main evidence of that is an evolution towards a data-as-a-service direction by using cloud-based solutions to empower different users in data analytics. However, most of that significant potential can be easily lost just because of the immaturity of the organization’s data culture and the data literacy level of each, single employee.

Frankly speaking, too much focus is on the technology side and too less on people. Companies still mainly invest in training improving technical skills or ability to use specific tools.  Training which teaches how to use data for a specific purpose is in minority, even on the market is hard to find such offers. We must remember that employees have different backgrounds and different skills. Some of them would always need assistance in data analytics, just because their core skills are allocated somewhere else and there, they bring business value. We shouldn’t require them to waste their time learning how to work with data, while they should master other skills.

Challenge with an approach data as a product

The next point to cover is how those organisations are advanced in digital transformation. Before introducing a new strategy, some basics must be prepared. Many companies would like to be data-driven, however still suffer from a lack of integrated, automated, and accessible databases that provide high-quality data. And it is not a completed wish list.

Efficient and business valuable data sets serve specific business areas. In most cases, it means that different business areas have data prepared differently including data aggregation, hierarchy, and perspectives. The huge challenge for organizations is to provide an environment, structure, and infrastructure to approach data as a product. It requires investment in hiring an adequate number of professionals and changes in existing processes and technology. Apart from that, DaaP is still a fresh concept and companies need time to get familiar with it and step in on this journey.

Underdevelopment of tech-savvy

I’m writing above about too much focusing on tech training. However, some companies don’t have any vision of how to support their employees in their tech-savvy journey while still expecting results.

I was the victim of such an approach gaining access to the tools without any training and vision of employee development and setting a clear learning path. Worse, I was required to figure out how to upskill myself. That was a horrible experience, both for the employee and the organization that ends up in frustration and lack of results.

Mature organizations employ professionals who take care of the technological development of employees in accordance with the company’s long-term strategy and vision. They make sure that the skill set of employees can shift the company from point A to point B. Without them or similar roles, no major changes can take place.

The hell of multi-sources of truth

If you are a fan of Marvel like me, you know what chaos can be brought by having multi universes. The same risk can be a case when we allow separate business units to use databases without supervision. Business units may report the same metrics differently only because they understand or define them differently. From the inside, we can observe that data retrieval is processed in a different manner.

This generates a bunch of problems. Especially in proofing whose numbers are correct ones, and this requires additional time and resources that could be spent on more valuable tasks. Not to mention ruining trust and mutual relations between departments and employees.

As a key conclusion, I would say that giving employees the freedom to create their own dashboard places a huge responsibility on their shoulders and requires them to have various sets of technical skills. Such a strategy may be similar to throwing the baby out with the bathwater if companies do not invest time and money in ensuring that their employees acquire the skills they need, are equipped with the right tools and data sets can be used without worrying about the disinformation.

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/top-10-data-analytics-trends-for-2022/

How to better design dashboards and reports. Data Storytelling in BI products design.

Not everyone has an opportunity to be on the first line and present data in front of the audience. Many are silent data heroes at the back of the stage. They constantly work with data to make sense of them and pass it on to others.

I know from my experience that in many organizations people work in silos, and it can be a tangible barrier in delivering well-designed, actionable dashboards. The best option to overcome this phenomenon is to make an effort and find end-users to gather their requirements and tailor reports for their specific needs. Only in this way you can find out what the true story should be built around a particular data set. The rest is a piece of cake.

Nevertheless, if you are one of that data heroes, to be honest, you are the true master here. You decide which data sets will be distributed within your organization and to what extent.  So, you may not be presenting the results in front of the audience, but they are likely seeing them with your eyes.

However, it is a double-edged sword. Having great influence results in having huge responsibility. It is a challenge for every communicator, and you are a kind of communicator because you prepare and hand down information.

I will just present only a few which I find very useful, and I often use them in my work. These technics are easy to remember and easy to implement, so everyone can benefit from them. They have similar usage as linguistic construction which can influence you to buy or do something.

We will go through:

• Colour
• Size
• Shape
• Common region
• Position

COLOR

Humans see colours, maybe not in such spectacular range like other animals (check this article about hummingbirds), but still it is one of the most important senses that helps us understand the world and allows us to run away from wild animals in the jungle.

When it comes to designing dashboards, use colours to lead the audience from point to point. It is important to use just several ones. There is a good rule of five. Take five colours, assign to them meaning as for example white – the main colour for background, grey – major of data in data visualization, dark blue – numbers, black – text and icons, and orange – focal points. You can extend orange to orange and green if you want to differentiate positive and negative results.

In such way, you use colours on purpose and teach the audience their role in conveying the message.

To illustrate that we can compare these two pictures. Both charts present the same information – sales of regions. But the chart on the left side doesn’t promote any region. We can see all of them equally. It just aggregates information and presents them on the graph. However, the chart on the right side emphasises one of the regions (yes, that chart is created for the north region manager) by making it orange ( the darkest colour) and the rest regions greyish and tells a story about this specific region performance. The rest of the regions give context to the story.

Due to that simple change, you draw attention to one region and force others to look at it closely with avoiding special interest in other regions.

SHAPE / SIZE

What else you can use to push some information in front of another? Humans can see easily changes in sizes or shapes, so why not to use it for our purpose? Especially when we remember about people who have some colour seeing difficulties. Size and shape are another visual channel which can be used to spotlight some data. Make it bigger, make it stronger.

When we change solid line of North to dashed one and thicken it, our brain processes information even faster than before, because we use three visual channels to code this information: colour, shape, and size.

Even when we take out colour and leave visualization black and white (which sometimes serves the best for better contrast), we can still achieve the same result.

Size cannot be introduced in all visualizations. Would be hard to do it with bar chart. But regarding shape it is much easier. You can use pattern to fill in North bar.

Size is essential for presenting numbers. Differing numbers sizes, we control which of them play the first fiddle and which ones are providing additional information. Shape can be manifested in font type or its boldness. But we must remember here about the parent rule of readability. There is a general rule that on dashboards we use sans serif fonts because they are without any additional decorations and work better for displaying on screens.

Unexpectedly, font types can evoke some emotions or can reflect word meaning in their look. It is especially handy when you are about to design infographics.  See examples.

COMMON REGION

Do you know that people tend to group and interpret objects which are in the close or shared areas? This principle has even its own name as the Law of Common Region and was devised by Gestalt group in 1920s.

I’m a hard user of that techniques when it comes to design dashboards. A single piece of information itself has no impact, however, when you connect a few dots together, the message can be powerful. To make it happen, it is important to create a common area for these elements. We can do this by adding background or border and create visual boundaries.

POSITION

Studies regarding how people view websites, commonly known as Eyetracking, are consistent in results. The area with the greatest attention is the top-left corner of the page follows by the top-right corner, then the down-left and the last one is the down-right corner (see image below).

source

Of course, that we can use it to support data storytelling! Just divide a dashboard area into four quadrants and follow these two simple rules:

• In 1&2 place information which you want to highlight as KPIs, the crucial changes in trends, threats and opportunities, and components which are essential to navigate on the dashboard.  Do not forget about the title. Use the best practices of designing UX (check this link about best practices in UX and find out what we have in common with goldfish).
• In 3 & 4 are additional information that broadens perspectives or sheds another light on the already presenting data. At the bottom is the great place to place information about last data refresh, or report confidentiality.

Data storytelling is a mix of knowledge about data visual presentation, design and people perception. Having these components in place you are armed with a very powerful tool, which makes the audience listening to your voice…, even when this voice is behind dashboards that you deliver.