How to plan and implement a successful SharePoint dashboard
On a regular basis, organizations establish and refine their company’s strategic goals. Each strategic goal is usually broken down into one to three departmental goals. Each departmental goal is then analyzed and one to three key performance indicators (KPIs) are established to track progress towards achieving each department goal. KPIs are quantifiable measurements of the key success factors for an organization. A SharePoint Dashboard is a tool that helps organizations track and share measurements of KPIs to determine whether or not they are on-target to achieve department goals. If departmental goals are on-target, then the corresponding company-wide goals are likely to also be on-target.
SharePoint dashboards typically tap into the data stored in other business systems and provide an easy way for employees to access and interpret the information displayed within the dashboard. A SharePoint Dashboard is not supposed to replace other business systems, but instead provide summary level information about the data stored in these systems. Examples of these systems include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, as well as data tracked by web services, such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, and email campaign services.
SharePoint dashboards should be visually appealing and provide information at-a-glance. A well designed SharePoint dashboard will give you enough information to manage by exception, so that your eyes are quickly drawn to the KPIs that need attention (e.g. problem areas should automatically turn Red; areas performing well should automatically turn Green).
A SharePoint dashboard can access data stored within SharePoint and in other systems. This includes Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), SharePoint 2010, and SharePoint Foundation. It is common to create a SharePoint Dashboard that tracks data stored in SharePoint lists and SharePoint document libraries. Within lists and document libraries, a view is created that organizes the information contained within a list or library in such a way that one can measure whether or not the KPI is on-target. The SharePoint Dashboard taps into these views to provide a graphical view of the KPI over time so that senior management can easily determine whether or not the KPI is healthy or not.
When planning a SharePoint Dashboard, it is important to keep in mind that it is possible to have too many KPIs. For any given department, a good rule of thumb is to identify 3-5 KPIs that will help a department determine whether or not their part of the business is healthy. Too many KPIs can cause a group of people to lose focus, which can be counterproductive. The key advantage of a SharePoint Dashboard is that it can be automated to collect relevant, summary data on a regular basis over time. This provides an organization with the ability to identify trends and take corrective action if trends are not moving in the right direction.