There’s nothing worse than spending hours building a report to spec, exactly how they requested it, and they never use it again. Worse, they just export it to Excel and start doing their own manipulations, negating all the effort you spent. The following dashboard first steps will ensure that you can move beyond the request and create a lasting, impactful report.

First Step: Who is your audience?

Before I even dream of touching a report, the most critical thing to think about is my audience. That should determine everything else about my report. Is it the board or an executive, who wants high-level, brief, impactful visuals or a single KPI? A manager, who needs mid-level information and a way to easily compare their team’s performance against goals? An employee, who needs a grid of data to perform a daily task?

Huge differences in how reports are approached go far beyond what is on the report and need to go deep into who is going to use it: how many decimal places to include, where the most important information should go (and what the most important information is to that audience), how much documentation to include in the report and where to put that documentation.

Second Step: What would make this dashboard a success to them?

Once I know my audience, I need to understand how they will use the report. How does the data fit into their lives and what are they doing with the information? What actions will they be taking as a result of what they see on your report? If they say they will be checking the report daily, why are they doing that? Are they looking for something unusual, like an outlier, or trying to remember results day-to-day to build trends in their head? Are they taking a specific action, such as scheduling their day, controlling expenses, motivating sales, or making a business decision? If they are checking it daily, do they need to be?

If the report audience isn’t changing what they are doing for the day or prompting action, they probably don’t need to see it daily, and this might just be a habit. When you work with your business counterpart to understand what they are doing, you may be able to get them to reexamine what they are doing.

• Report alerting could inform them about outliers and save them the daily check.
• If they are trying to remember trends, visualize the trend for them so they can check less often.
• If they are trying to control expenses, can you create a visualization that pinpoints the areas that might have the most impact?
• If they are trying to predict staffing or revenue, can you add predictive analytics or machine learning? Most reporting tools now include some form of predictive analytics, so this can be straightforward to add.
• If they are trying to dig into why something has changed, Power BI has a key influencers visual.
• If they want to explore data, the decomposition tree visual is underrated but very powerful.

Third Step: What questions need answers?

After you narrow down the audience and how they’ll use the report, you have the foundation to lay out the questions the dashboard needs to answer. Spend time with the report requestor or user, preferably the direct audience themselves, and ask them what questions the data must answer. If your visual isn’t answering a question concisely, don’t include it. Some dashboards tell a story, and that story should be answers to a series of questions. Stay tightly focused as you add things to your dashboard; less is more.

And that’s it! If you keep these essential things in mind when beginning to build a new report or revamping a report that isn’t serving its best purpose, your dashboards will get more use and your users will get time back to take actions on the story your data tells.

For more tips on making the most of your dashboards, check out Four Ways to Level Up Your PBI Reports or see 8Bit remodel a client dashboard!