Progress Tracking
Steering your strategy with dashboards for performance tracking
Measurement is one of the central mechanisms that ensure successful execution of a strategy. Whether you are leveraging an OGSTM framework or an OKR-based approach to executing your strategy, you will have to measure the outcomes of your, and your organization’s efforts to build accountability and make performance tweaks.
Dashboards are a nifty tool that help you track the performance of anything: a group of people, of a process, or a strategy. While organizations have worked with reports and scorecards in the past, today’s digital ecosystem has made it possible to improve decision-making with real-time dashboards.
“In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.”
Bill Gates
Co-Founder, Microsoft
Performance tracking with dashboards
The structure and content of dashboards is generally determined by their purpose: that is, what they measure, and who will use them. For example, senior management members of a company might want to track the performance of a strategy over the progression of months, quarters, or years. On the other hand, a project manager might want a granular view of how many of the assigned tasks were completed by her/his team, and how far they are from the end goal.
That’s why there are different types of dashboards. Some examples include operational performance dashboards, strategic dashboards, analytical dashboards, tactical dashboards, and so on.
How to create impactful dashboards
Dashboards must serve to improve the decision-making of the audience that they are intended for. As a result, creating impactful dashboards calls for a systematic approach to determining what measurements matter, and how to present them to the audience.
Measuring performance with real-time dashboards
Today, progress tracking dashboards can synchronize with systems to show real-time data that represents the as-is state of processes and functions. Such dashboards can give businesses a strategic edge while building accountability at each level of the organization.
We have helped our clients measure the impact of their strategies by helping them leverage dashboards for performance tracking.
Food For Thought
“Leaders have three fundamental responsibilities.
They craft a vision, they build alignment, and they champion execution.”
Anonymous
(but we’ll assume it was a woman)
