I've been thinking over this question a lot, especially in light of the LEAP session on KPI given by Cella (called "You have data, now what?").
So here are a few thoughts.
* Meaningful and boring are not mutually exclusive. In other words, your "boring" reports may hold the gist of what is meaningful for your company. Corollary: "visually exciting" doesn't equate to "meaningful," either.
* "Meaningful" is often a subjective term. What's meaningful for me, is often not meaningful for anyone else.
- I'm a sysadmin, and have created reports to help me display my current work in a more informative way. I don't find it informative to see pies, bars, and line graphs. On the other hand, it's helpful to me to have hilighted rows, bolded text, or text in different colors. So I often use red text to show missed deadlines or task assignments from VIPs, while some of our workers whose work is perpetually late (not their fault; blame project dependencies) would find the sea of red very distressing/distracting.
- Different strokes for different folks: I'll mention that our email team (they create our bacn and schedule it for delivery), like to see their schedule in calendar form. So for them, they use a calendar. Several other groups like that approach too, and often list a calendar in their dashboard.
- Higher level execs often don't want to be inundated with the granular details of every task or every project so for them it made better sense to start grouping the data into pies or bars or lines. As a general rule of thumb, I use bars to show "groups of data" over time (e.g. number of users per division added each month [number of users is one group, division is another group]), and "groups of data" over time is useful to show a trend of what's growing or shrinking (e.g. number of users added each month continues to show growth). Pies are useful to show a sense of totals and percentages (e.g. of all the projects we completed in 2015, half the pie belongs to that one troublemaking division).
So I'd throw your question below right back at you - what reports are you currently creating, what meaning do they hold for the recipient of your report, and who are your intended audiences (and how do they like to see their info)? Armed with those answers, you'd stand a better chance of creating dashboards filled with reports that give more visibility in a concise way -- and isn't that more what you might need to provide?
As an example of the previous paragraph, our design team (headed by the creative director who acts somewhat in the role of a traffic manager as well) would probably like to see rows of data, green highlight rows showing what they can start on, plain rows for what's coming down the pike, red text showing missed deadlines, and columns showing information pertinent to them. Creative director could get the same report, but in the form of a pie and she might focus on the slice showing high profile, complex projects (in order to make sure those get extra attention), as well as generally keeping an eye on numbers (the rest of the pie).
Hope that helps.
-skye
In Reply to Lucas Eric:
Hi everyone - I'm looking for inspiration. I have to produce meaningful project status / quality dashboards. What I've been using so far is a bunch of boring reports, no color, no graphs.
Would you be willing to upload a screen shot of your colorful project status reports or dashboards? I want to steal every good idea you have :-)
Thanks!
Eric
