Executive Dashboards in Performance Improvement Frameworks
The Executive Dashboard is the key to driving a corporate culture of performance improvement. The red/green/yellow nature of displaying progress towards performance improvement goals is both intuitive and easily communicated. Everyone understands a KPI. To a top-level manager, each status indicator on the dashboard not only represents the underlying processes, but also is tied to a specific person that he or she manages. The use of the performance dashboard as a communication vehicle between different people involved with performance management and improvement is what makes the tool so useful.
Performance is a measure of results, but one that is abstract in nature. As an abstract concept, it must be represented by concrete events and measurable things. On top of this is the softer ”feeling” that a manager transmits up the chain via his inputs on his dashboard. An executive dashboard must combine hard measurements (surfaced automatically by the dashboarding software) and these softer communications (perhaps the managers “publish” an overall status by manually flipping red, green or yellow indicators as a communication device).
Let’s look at a Performance Dashboard White Paper courtesy of MyDials, a company focusing on executive dashboards via a “Software As A Service” model.
Their very informative paper sketches out the following Performance Improvement Framework:
As you see, the idea is that executive dashboards provide managers with the ability to pay attention to three dimensions:
- Management Focus
- Measurement Philosophy
- Improvement Methodology
On the Management Focus axis, you want to move towards providing a true value stream that focuses on the client. Measurement Philosophy should move you towards a lean approach and the Improvement Methodology should strive towards a continous mode rather than sporadic.
Let’s look at a screenshot of one of their performance dashboards:
As they summarize, their dashboards enable you to continously pursue performance improvement opportunities:
- Identify problems before they manifest themselves
- Interpret (analyze) the information to understand the problem
- Understand a solution for rectifying the situation
- Set actions
- Monitor outcomes
They provide a nice graphic of their performance dashboarding process:
Tags: Executive Dashboard for Process Improvement Measurement, Performance Dashboards, Management Dashboarding, KPI
