Dashboard
A dashboard puts the few numbers someone checks often to make a decision on one screen, each next to its goal or its trend.
Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.
The clinic missed 14% of its appointments this week, up from 11% last week. Is a 3-point jump in one week unusual?
What it's for: letting one person see, in a minute, what they need for a decision they make often, like which location to call or what to restock. It shows only what that decision needs.
What makes it useful: a few numbers, each defined as tightly as a KPI and shown next to its goal or trend; one chart per question, like a line chart for change over time or a bar chart to compare locations. If a number combines groups of different sizes, compute it as a weighted average.
Practice it in What do you compare a KPI against? The target, last week and the trend.
How it's used
How to build one
A clinic manager's dashboard
- marked: Who it's for and what they decide: the manager, every Monday, decides which location to call first.If nobody decides anything differently based on what they see, it's a report, not a dashboard.
- Three to five numbers: appointments, % missed, revenue and idle chair hours.Each with a written definition: what's counted, what it's divided by and over what period.
- Each number next to something: the goal, last week or its trend.As in the figure: a number on its own doesn't tell you whether to act.
- One chart per question, in reading order: the most urgent at the top left.
When to look closer
The clinic-wide rate nobody actually had
Appointments in B, missed in C and % in D, for Downtown, North and South
- marked: =AVERAGE(D2:D4)
- 16.7%
The dashboard says the clinic missed 16.7% of appointments. Do you think that's what happened?
Ask your Maestro about Dashboard
It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.
You: What does "Dashboard" mean, in plain words?
Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Which decision do you make every week that a dashboard could help with?
Asking about: Answers from the page "Which charts go on a dashboard? One chart per question"
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Related terms
- KPI (key performance indicator)
A KPI is a number a team tracks to know whether it's doing well at what matters most, like monthly sales or orders delivered on time. It only works if it's well defined, so two people who calculate it get the same answer.
- Line chart
A line chart joins points in order, almost always over time, to show how a number changes: whether it rises, falls or repeats every season.
- Bar chart
A bar chart compares amounts across categories: each bar is a category and its length is the number. Use it to see which branch sold the most.
- Weighted average
A weighted average gives each value a weight for how much it counts, instead of treating them all the same: multiply each value by its weight, add them up and divide by the sum of the weights.