You’re approaching the close-out of your engagement with Trindent. You and your executive team have spent weeks collaboratively working side by side with the Trindent team to identify opportunities and implementing process changes. To tie the work together, Trindent is now creating an executive dashboard to roll up all the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from each departmental dashboard to give you high-level visibility to your entire organization, and help you make better decisions.
In building the executive dashboard, Trindent carefully curates the information it contains. The dashboard cannot incorporate every single KPI from every single department because the interface would be overcrowded, creating confusion instead of clarity. At the same time, in sorting through which KPIs should be included, none of the critical ones can be missed, otherwise the information presented will be incomplete and may lead to inaccurate decision making.
This is the obstacle for many large companies – the bigger the organization, the more KPIs there are to track, and the harder it is to know which are the critical ones.
So how can large quantities of information be correctly synthesized and presented so they can be absorbed by executives and enable them to make informed decisions?
Getting Past Information Paralysis with Dashboards
The answer starts with looking at the 80/20 rule. 80% of the information an executive needs to have about their organization will come from the executive dashboard, and gathering this information will account for 20% of the work.
Analyzing executive dashboard data is a quick way of getting an overall health check of the organization. It allows executives to have that important high-level view of how every department is performing both on their own and as part of the collective.
For this to be an effective exercise rather than overwhelming and frustrating one, it is imperative that only the correct top priority KPIs be included. Think of the executive dashboard as the instrumentation panel in an airplane cockpit. The pilot has an endless number of dials, switches, indicators, and screens to look at, but focuses first and foremost on a smaller number of main controls to stay informed on the overall well-being of the aircraft and the flight.
Trindent’s executive dashboard functions in much the same way – only the KPIs most critical to tracking the health of your organization are built into the dashboard.
Leveraging Your Leadership Team to Get the Missing Pieces
But if the executive dashboard provides 80% of the information, it must be augmented in order to paint a complete picture of the state of the organization.
The remaining 20% of information has to come in the form of update meetings and dialogue within the leadership team, which will account for 80% of the information gathering work. Though time consuming, it’s highly effective to get updates from executive team discussions, as members of the team are immersed in their respective departments, are responsible for departmental performance and function, and are deeply familiar with operational details.
There is added benefit to these meetings and discussions. They empower leaders to take accountability for their role in the business and their responsibility in communicating the right information to the wider leadership team.
Conclusion
Together, using a properly built executive dashboard and holding recurring leadership team meetings is the correct systematic approach to being well informed about the health of the organization. This approach gives any top executive a competitive advantage by streamlining their ability to make informed business decisions.
As part of our client engagements, Trindent facilitates getting this important initiative off the ground. We not only build a robust but properly curated executive dashboard, but help to expedite the setup phase of the recurring executive meetings, ensuring they have the proper participants, focus, and cadence to guarantee the meetings will align objectives and allow any top executive to make game changing decisions their organization needs.