The design of dashboards and their relationship to both reports and other dashboards is critical to provide a consistent and robust package of information assets for an organization. Report authors and BI teams can use visual selection, layout, and supporting tiles to maximize the value and usability of dashboards.
Report authors are best positioned to produce initial drafts of dashboards based on their knowledge of the most utilized or valued report visuals. Ultimately, a well-designed dashboard delivers both at-a-glance visibility to the most important metrics for the consumer as well as accessibility to supporting and related details.
Particularly for executives and senior management, the dashboard should support all essential business questions and metrics, thus not requiring any user clicks. If an executive or senior manager regularly has to access underlying reports, make filter selections on live pages, or utilize several dashboards to answer core questions, the architecture and scope of the Power BI app should be reconsidered.
The following dashboard leverages the Power KPI custom visual from Microsoft, described in Chapter 6, Applying Custom Visuals, Animation, and Analytics, and custom images to organize the dashboard by Sales Territory Group:
In this example, three KPIs are displayed at a global or corporate level and for each of the three sales territory groups. The Power KPI custom visual is chosen for these metrics as it presents greater detail and context than other related visuals, such as the standard KPI. For example, the Total Net Sales vs. Plan tile at the global level provides the actual value for the latest month ($2.5M for 2017-Nov) as well as the YOY growth for this month (2.3%) in addition to the ability to hover over points on the line to see individual values for particular months.
The user, such as the vice president of global sales, can quickly monitor overall performance relative to plan via the KPI symbol icons in the top-right corner of the tiles (green caret up, red caret down). Additionally, two standard KPI visuals and a 100% stacked column chart have been added specific to the global level to deliver YTD sales and margin performance information and the recent mix of reseller and internet sales channels.
To view the details of a dashboard tile, such as the individual monthly values of one of the smaller tiles, a user can open the tile in focus mode. Focus mode fills the entire screen with the single visual and thus makes it easy to perceive differences in the length and shape of columns and lines, respectively. Focus mode can be accessed by hovering over the top-right corner of a dashboard tile and then clicking the more options ellipsis (three dots) command. The following example exposes the more options available for the Total Net Sales vs. Plan dashboard tile:
The 12 Power KPI dashboard tiles, combined with focus mode, provide the user with a simple interface for a robust suite of information. For a user at the global level of the sales organization, this level of detail may be more than sufficient for most scenarios, precluding the need to access other dashboards or reports.
Most importantly, the same three KPIs (Total Net Sales vs. Plan, Reseller Net Sales vs. Plan, Internet Net Sales vs. Plan), are also featured in separate, dedicated dashboards for each sales territory group.
For example, the total net sales visual for North America indicating a miss to plan of -2.3% is also displayed in a North America sales dashboard. Simply clicking this tile on the Global sales dashboard opens the North America dashboard, providing several additional visuals specific to this Sales Territory Group. Additionally, the North America sales dashboard follows the same structure as the Global sales dashboard and thus contains sets of tiles dedicated to the United States and Canada.
If necessary, a third layer of dashboards could be created for each country within each sales territory group, thus enabling even greater dashboard navigation flexibility (for example, Global | Europe | Germany). With the same Power BI dataset being used for all reports and dashboards in the app workspace, the row-level security roles described in Chapter 4, Developing DAX Measures and Security Roles, can ensure users do not have access to KPIs outside the scope of their assigned role. Additional details and considerations for planning multiple dashboards and creating links between dashboards and reports are described later in this chapter.