Case Study - Think I.T. Live Dashboards
Although Think Insight is a new offering for Think I.T.
clients, it’s a service we’ve been utilising internally for a while now and we
believe it’s a service all businesses will benefit from. I wanted to demonstrate an example of a live
dashboard we have established here at Think I.T. which have given us great
insight and knowledge.
As you will be aware, our primary application is designed to
manage our support/service tickets, so with service in mind we want to ensure
we are achieving our KPI’s and more importantly highlighting when we are not
achieving them! We wanted to develop a
live and up to date dashboard which in one simple screen will show all the
indicators that we feel are most important to us.
So I set about developing the live dashboard using Excel. After meetings with the HOD’s to determine what the KPI requirements were, we were quickly able to develop a basic but usable 1st draft. We then needed to hone in the results by defining the exclusions and ranges to ensure the results were accurate and relevant to our requirements.
As with any dashboard the presentation is key – a user needs
to be able to absorb the information quickly. Our requirements outlined that it needed to be 1 screen with everything
we wanted to know about our service tickets, but with the ability to drill into
the data to get more information on an ad hoc basis.
Choosing the best view, whether it be a chart, table, widget
or just a bold highlighted number can greatly influence the success or
readability of the dashboard. Along with
some clever formatting conditions, to highlight criteria matching failures in
Red for example you get a great tool that we will use minute by minute every
day of operation. We have since
developed a live dashboard for time, sales and inventory. These live dashboards can now be displayed in
a public area, or shared throughout the company so everyone can see how close
they are at achieving success.
I’m sure if you were to think about the information that you have at hand, you’ll see how this dashboard strategy can improve staff performance, motivation and appraisal, as well as improving customer service, upselling and giving you great competitive edge. Your data really is one of your most valuable assets, so why not put it to use.
Imagine;
- a doctors surgery having a live dashboard for their waiting room kpi’s,
- a legal firm with a live dashboard for their team’s billable hours,
- a manufacturer with a live dashboard of production targets,
- a retail store of live sales and inventory.
Once you open the data door, the options really are endless.
