Required Media Laureate Education (Producer). (2012). Dashboards. Baltimore, MD: Author. Note: The approximate length of this media piece is 6 minutes. In this video, William Ward discusses the use of dashboards as a tool for tracking organizational performance. He compares different types of dashboards and describes how to select the most relevant data to include on a dashboard. “Dashboards” Program Transcript WILLIAM WARD: One of the newest tools managers use to help them understand their performance is called a dashboard. The dashboard is merely a reporting tool that displays a limited, but significant, set of data that's easily understood by everyone who looks at it. A well developed dashboard will include both leading indicators and trailing indicators. Leading indicators are the ones that tell us where things are going, while the trailing indicators tell us where we've been. Managers need to look at both. Clearly, they need to know what has happened in the past. That's the way their performance will be judged. But better managers need to and want information that tells them about where they're going and what future actions they need to take to reinforce good performance trends or to deal with those issues that are likely to cause problems in the future. There are two challenges involved in developing a proper dashboard-- the right metrics and the best way to convey the information. The individual metrics used in a dashboard must meet certain criteria, characteristics that will make them effective in conveying performance information. First and foremost is the notion of measureability. Consider average length of stay. Typically, organizations measure average length of stay for inpatients in terms of days. And so we might hear that an institution has an average length of stay of 4.7 days or 3.9 days, where that the average length of stay in the ICU is 2.6 days. And while that's clearly measurable, does it really suit our purposes? And I think the answer is no. There can be fluctuations in the amount of time the patient spends in a bed that isn't seen when we're measuring using days. We should consider using hours. For example, a four-day length of stay can be anywhere between 92 hours and 100 hours. If we only measure in days, we might not notice that the patient stay is creeping up from 94 to 95 hours, maybe from 96 to 98, and so on. The way we measure can prevent us from seeing this trend develop. And I think it's fair to say that a patient who's in a bed for 100 hours-- that four-day length of stay-- is it significantly more risk of an adverse event than the patient who is only in the bed for 92 hours, that same four-day length of stay. © 2012 Laureate Education, Inc. 1 Another important aspect of performance metrics is that they be agreed upon in advance to avoid ambiguity and to avoid the old problem of chasing a moving target. Managers not only need to focus on the important elements of performance, they need to remain focused over time. And changing the metrics makes that nearly impossible. What's a manager to do if one month she's measured on the basis of cost per unit of service and the next month is measured on the basis of compliance with budget? It means that a manager must constantly be changing focus. And that's not a good way to manage resources. The information contained in the dashboard should be understandable. And by that, I mean knowing how it was calculated. If we know how a metric was calculated, we know how to fix it if it happens to be off. Further, the metrics need to be communicable in a way that everyone, regardless of his or her education level, can understand. Finally, there needs to be a limit on the number of metrics. The idea is to allow managers to focus on the critical few indicators that require their undivided attention. The best way to do this is to either limit the number of metrics that we look at to perhaps a dozen or so or to report them in such a way that, despite having a ton of metrics, the person looking is able to focus their attention. One of the best ways to focus attention is to make the dashboard easier to read by using visual clues. Graphs, as opposed to tables that contain columns and rows of numbers, are more easily understood. In addition, given the diversity of the workforce and the language skills of those that are in it, a graph is a lot more effective way to communicate information than words and numbers. Colors can attract the eye in a way that plain black and white text can't. And so color is extremely helpful in focusing attention. A quick glance at the dashboard constructed like this one can provide everyone with a lot of valuable information very quickly. For any of the performance metrics in the dashboard, the color coding not only tells you whether performance is acceptable or not, but this one goes beyond to include the color blue, which signifies superior performance. So a well developed dashboard reduces the volume of data to a handful of elements, information that allows managers to understand their performance faster and take appropriate action sooner. And if it's structured properly, the dashboard will convey information to all levels of the organization in such a way that everyone, from the manager on down, is aware of what's happening and what needs to be done. [MUSIC] © 2012 Laureate Education, Inc. 2