Glossary
Dashboard
A dashboard is a screen showing current values for a set of metrics, usually pulled automatically and refreshed on its own. It is a display, not a management habit. A dashboard nobody opens on a schedule, with no name against the rows, is a report that happens to look good. The weekly read-out changes behavior; the dashboard supplies the numbers for it.
01
Where a dashboard helps and where it replaces the meeting
A dashboard feeds the Scorecard and does not replace it. Automatic collection is worth real money once the rows have settled, because it removes the Monday morning scramble. What a screen cannot do is make somebody say on track or off track out loud, and that sentence is the part of the weekly meeting that produces decisions.
Buying a dashboard is the most common way to feel like you are managing by numbers without changing a single meeting. Screens do not create accountability. A person reading a row and answering for it does. Build the habit on a spreadsheet for a quarter, find out which rows survive contact with reality, then automate the ones that are left.
Worked example: A forty-person online retailer bought a reporting tool in its first month and built eighteen tiles. No row had an owner and nobody looked. A year later they started a weekly meeting with seven rows on a shared sheet, three of them typed in by hand. Two quarters after that they rebuilt the dashboard, this time with seven tiles that matched the sheet.
Sources: klipfolio.com/resources/dashboard-examples; kpi.org/kpi-basics/dashboarding-and-analysis
Metric
A metric is any measurement your systems can produce: page views, tickets closed, average order value, headcount, days since the last accident.
02KPI
A KPI is a number a leadership team has agreed to run the business by: one owner, a goal written next to it, and a slot on the weekly agenda.
03Metric owner
A metric owner is the single person who answers for a row every week, which is not the same as the person who happens to have access to the report.
04Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard is a framework from Robert Kaplan and David Norton that asks a company to measure four things at once and not money alone.
05KPIs: what they are, how many to track, and which matter
A practical guide to key performance indicators for small companies: definitions, leading vs lagging measures, examples by department, and how many to track.
Start with a real question
Not sure which of these you actually need?
Tell us what the leadership team is arguing about. A person replies within one business day with a straight answer, whether that is a book, a tool or an implementer.
A person reads every one.