How to Develop Your Ultimate Dashboard

Setting Your Goals. Each measure in the dashboard should have a goal or target. Compile management interviews, Human Resources priorities, and set the measurement goal against the desired performance for the organization. Ideally, you will be able to determine a hard dollar amount of savings or revenue increase from the goal (such as decreasing turnover by 10 percent results in a $5 million annual savings), or you will be able to tie back a stated executive priority (such as, We promote a culture of promoting from within).

Modeling Your Measures. You have already determined what the executive’s priorities are, and now you need to model what the metric will look like. What data will you need? What best practices exist that are appropriate for this measure? Model your metric using mock data in Excel and shop it around to others for feedback. Make sure to validate your decisions.

Building Your Metrics. This is the actual work of creating the metric using real data. If you have an ad hoc tool this could be user-accessible; if not, you may need the support of a technical resource to build the reports for you. If you do need a technical resource, modeling the metrics becomes critical to your success since your report developer needs to understand exactly what the report is supposed to do.

Building Your Dashboard. Think of your dashboard as a collection of well-focused reports on one page. After you have your reports created, you can begin think about how best to represent them on a single page using graphs and other elaborate techniques where necessary.

Caring for Your Data. You may have the information you need in many different places. Someone needs to care for this data, which includes making sure that users of the technology supporting you (HRIS, ATS, TMS, and so on) are completing the information you need. This also includes surveys. A little maintenance of the data saves hours of data repair later on.

Validating Your Results. Without validation, your organization could easily be representing your data in the completely wrong way. Check your assumptions with your peers, with managers in different departments, or even finance. Gerry Crispin of Career Xroads tells a remarkable story about a young HR manager who wanted to completely change the way the company recruited, but she didn’t know how to build the ROI case and didn’t know how to get the data she needed. So, she approached the COO and asked for help. Not only did he help her create the ROI with all of the supporting data, but he co-presented the idea to the board, and the two of them completely changed the way the company approached recruiting for the better.