Forget the big-screen dashboards. Laptop-friendly business dashboards improve focus, mobility, and leadership in growing companies.
“We need this big monitor in the lobby showing the overall status of our operation.”
“I want to see all the financial KPIs on one dashboard.”
“Is there a tool out there to merge the dashboards of our CRM, our finance system, and our operational IT systems?”
Dashboard Purpose: Overview
More often than not, large dashboards are a demonstration of power instead of effective tools for diligent leadership. For whatever reason people want to show sensitive business information to their entire workforce, or even their guests in the lobby of your office.
Dashboards were designed to give an overview. Think of a dashboard in a car — what other information do you need besides the speed, remaining gas in the tank (or remaining charge in the battery), and some red warning lights in case of a malfunction?
Besides the relevance of information on a dashboard, dashboards only make sense for dynamic information. Why would you track the tire pressure in real time on the dashboard of your car? It’s enough to have a warning lamp going off if tire pressure falls below a certain threshold.
Dashboard Tactics: Parameters for A 30-Person Company
At Yonder, we have reduced the commercial dashboard KPIs to very few parameters:
- Liquidity
- Revenue and costs
- Order intake
All of these parameters are tracked in three variants — budget, forecast, and actual. An Excel dashboard gives us an overview of the financial and commercial situation of the company without the need to scroll around on my MacBook Pro 16-inch display. That’s what I call an overview.
I already hear the screaming that technical teams need dashboards, too. Sprint burndown charts, for example. We’ve done away with that. Because a sprint burndown chart gives the wrong idea of progress: When done properly, sprints are planned in complexity points. And against common behavior, you can’t translate complexity linearly into time. So your sprint burndown chart will always be conveying the wrong situation. That’s why we reduced the technical dashboards to two Kanban sprint boards — one for the DevOps team and one for the mobile team.
Last but not least, there is the service desk dashboard indicating the number of open service requests, feature requests, and bug reports.
Dashboards for the Road
So I ended up with one Excel dashboard and three pinned browser tabs on my laptop, and I have an overview of the status of my company.
This means that I can lead my company from pretty much anywhere, I am not depending on that big screen in in my office. And with things being hectic sometimes and plans changing all the time, it’s imperative to be able to lead from anywhere.
Last but not least, not having a large screen has two further advantages:
First, you kill the excuses for not being able to do certain tasks on the road because you need a big screen to complete them.
Second, you simplify your work because you can’t have ten documents and tools open side-by-side on a laptop.
My office is where my laptop is.
