Learning is a never ending adventure. You end up realizing a whole lot of things once you are curious about an item of interest. The area of interest that stirred my curiosity this time was; dashboards.
What are they? What entails a dashboard that helps us understand the data easily?
A dashboard is a centralized, visual interface that displays metrics, data points, and key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time; thus helping in decision-making.
The dashboard entails KPI's, metrics and data points that helps in this role.
The idea that propelled me to understand this topic is to help all aspiring analysts and experienced engineers to develop good dashboards.
Dashboards should not just be filled with many graphics that do not answer to the key questions intended to better the enterprises performance.
Importance of Dashboards
- Enables continued monitoring and actual analysis of insights.
- Helps to support informed decision making by business executives
- Through identifying patterns and trends in data, strategic planning and risk management is achieved by the company's executives.
What is a Data point?
Data points are individual texts, dates or items in a worksheet that form important basis for visualization and analysis.
They could be an intersection of two points in a graph or distinct parts in the cells of various worksheets.
They are represented by slices, dots and bars in a data series.
They can also be represent key items that need farther investigation by the important management figures normally represented as outliers.
What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
Anyone new to the analytics world could succumb to getting mixed up. Ideally, elements of a data set in different columns are not KPI.
That is to say:
- CustomerID is not a KPI
- Ordernumber is not a KPI
- CostofProduction is not KPI
From the above submissions, it is proper to digest and lay bare the facts from my inquest that a KPI is:-
I. It is not a text - it is a number backed by information.
- Lead time (in days)
- Average revenue
- Discount (%)
- Net Sales (volumes)
II. Too many KPI's = confusion
From my understanding about KPI's, I was obsessed with need to fill my dashboard with many KPI's thinking I was improving how my users interact with the shared data.
Unfortunately, I was wrong, this does not in any way help my users.
III. KPI's answers "how" and metrics helps to answer 'why"
A good example for this:
Net Profits increased
What is a Metric?
Our metrics helps to answer this, why?:-
A metric is a quantitative data form that measures performance against a specific goal.
Why?
- The number of goods sold rose
- The variable costs decreased by a considerable margin
- The price of our products were favorable in comparison to our competitors
IV. KPI's must change over time
The basis of a KPI is to track changes over a period of time.
This helps to measure the progress with ease.
A good KPI needs to change over time.
Slicers help to amplify the KPI. When you input a slicer to your data items; and it changes, it helps certify that it is a good KPI.
Dashboards are important when it comes to storytelling.
An easy to interact dashboard helps in quicker analysis and faster implementation of decisions made.
From my interest in trying to understand Microsoft Excel, it helped me to change my perspective towards it.
It has made me change from just seeing columns, rows and cells to viewing it as a performance measurement tool.
What are your metrics and data points?
What are your KPI's?
Are they helping you conduct a proper analysis or not helping at all?
The study quest continues 🚀
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