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Operational dashboard

1. Operational dashboard

Dashboards are used to monitor and support almost any type of business.

2. Dashboard taxonomies

They can be tailored to specific data and purposes, often leading to differences in visual design and functionality. To help navigate through this variation, it is helpful to look at dashboard taxonomies. The domain taxonomy classifies dashboards by industry types and their specific business measures. The level taxonomy determines the dashboard specification whether it is used on enterprise, departmental or individual levels. The update frequency classifies how often the data must be updated. The mode classification groups dashboards by their interactivity level and the display screen size.

3. Business roles taxonomy

Business role taxonomy describes the type of business activity and users that it must support. The breakdown is strategic, analytical, tactical, and operational. This classification is based on the management level junior, middle, or senior. The business activity has three levels: monitoring daily operations, analyzing trends and planning long-term goals.

4. Choosing the right dashboard

To decide on the most effective dashboard type, focus on the problems you are trying to solve. Are you looking for insights from operational data or aggregated indicators?

5. Choosing the right dashboard

Who will be using the dashboard? Managers, directors, or analysts.

6. Choosing the right dashboard

What gaps exist in your performance? Are you looking to assess daily or monthly performance or detect issues?

7. Choosing the right dashboard

What are your goals? Are you tracking performance against the goals or setting goals?

8. The everyday dashboard

The operational dashboard is arguably the most common dashboard type. The purpose is to provide, at a glance, a comprehensive snapshot of the daily performance of a specific business area. It contains a range of operational KPIs and has fairly detailed short-term data that is updated frequently. It only requires low interactivity for monitoring operational processes. This type is usually used by junior management and their teams since it helps track daily processes.

9. Operational dashboard benefits

The operational dashboard shows what is happening and it can also help predict the future allocation and strategies based on actual performance and data.

10. Operational dashboard benefits

It can be used as active management, identifying emerging trends through the latest indicators.

11. Operational dashboard benefits

It provides real-time visibility for your business using data visualization.

12. Operational dashboard benefits

It also can promote continuous improvement as you are able to make incremental changes, simplify work, and increase profitability.

13. Operational dashboard types

This dashboard is also very flexible: every business can use it to monitor the company's operations. This dashboard displays primarily quantitative measures of what's currently going on. For example, the marketing dashboard monitors campaign success, acquisition costs, and the number of clicks. Manufacturing dashboards track various production aspects, volumes, quantities, and returned items. The human resources dashboard monitors employee turnover and satisfaction. IT dashboard tracks resolved cases and the number of calls.

14. Operational dashboard graphical components

Once you determine metrics for monitoring, you can design a 3-layer dashboard displaying performance status, comparison, and change. The top layer often displays performance status using single and multi-value indicators.

15. Operational dashboard graphical components

The mid-layer could include bar graphs comparing performance between operational processes and bullet charts comparing actual values against the target values. More on bullet charts in lesson 3.

16. Operational dashboard graphical components

Finally, the bottom layer represents changes in performance between current and past periods, usually within a short-term frame.

17. Let's practice!

Let's reinforce now what we have learned about operational dashboards.