(Start with Watch What You’re Watching, then come back here; that one’s all principle, this is all application.)  

Now let’s build some dashboards.  We can vary them for daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly uses but every piece of data needs to be meaningful and inform our action in one of three areas:

• What we do.
• How we do it.
• Who we do it for.

Within these, we need to see the change.  For each data point, we’ll start with a meaningful metric, add a green or red percentage change over a non-noisy time period, and preferably a threshold for action.  (Head back to Watch What You’re Watching for details.)

What we do.  

This is our front end, our product, our service.  The solution we’re bringing to the problem we found.

Data here is mainly about quality control.  What we need to know depends a lot on what we’re doing but, in general terms, we need to understand how stable our output is (does it work) and how consistent it is in quality (does it work well)?

• What’s our downtime for customers? 
• Are we meeting SLA timelines? 
• What’s our daily production volume? 
• Are completing orders and engagements on time? 
• What’s our failure rate?   

It’s mainly quantitative questions. We’re not looking for signal-rich data here, we’re looking for flashing red lights and howling sirens. 🚨 This isn’t where we build an amazing business but it’s where we stop it blowing up.

How we do it.  

This is the mechanics, the operations, behind the scenes, the problems we need to solve inside the business.

How hard is it to deliver what we do (and how do we make it easier, cheaper and quicker over time)?  For each area of the business, we need to know:

• How profitable is it?
• How much staff time is deployed there (and at what level)?
• How much of our process have we automated?
• How many errors have we made?
• What’s our internal downtime?
• How much over/under capacity are we?

Again, we’re not looking for a lot of nuance but for those red lights, and again, this isn’t where we build an amazing business but it’s where we make it resilient, scalable and profitable.

Who we do it for.

These are our stakeholders.  Customers obviously, but staff too, shareholders, the public, the press, the regulators, our whole community, even our competitors (but we’ll deal with them another time).  This is where we build an amazing business.  

It doesn’t matter how good our product is if nobody’s buying it, if we can’t get funded, if our staff are about to walk out or if the regulators are about to step in.

This is where we need the nuance. We’re figuring out who we are in the world, or rather, who we’re seen to be (“there is only perception”). We need to know:

	What interactions are we having?	How valuable are those interactions?
For customers	What are our ratios of visits and discussions >> engagements and sign-ups >> retentions vs cancellations?	What’s our cost per customer? What are the value of our conversions?    What do our (potential) customers tell us about what they want?
For investors	How many times have we met, what updates have we given (how detailed), who responds?	Is the feedback good?  How many of our investors follow their money (and how deep are their pockets)?
For the team	How easy is it to recruit?  Are we growing the team or shrinking?  How are we tracking against our staff plan?  How many people tell us what they think?	What’s our staff satisfaction?  And our turnover?  What are the reviews like on Glassdoor?
For the rest	How many people see us in the press, or on social?  Do we have name recognition? How many people are in the audience when we’re on stage? How many interactions are we having with our regulators?	Does coverage drive engagement, do people remember our message (fondly)?  Do followers actually engage with us?  Are we having non-routine discussions with our regulator (does the team responsible sleep OK)?

Why are we bothering again?

Obviously this all needs tailoring for the specific business and we’ll keep fine-tuning it as we go but having great management information like this at our fingertips has three marked effects:

• It gives you actionable insight into the business in near-real-time.
• Knowing what’s measured aligns everyone around what matters.
• Good governance gives comfort to investors (and everybody else).

There’s no need for this to be a drain on resources as long as we set it up right and gather data at source (also, see the second bullet point above, this is a great reason for being transparent about what we’re measuring).

So, if we can do it (and we absolutely can) why on earth wouldn’t we?  The other option isn’t leadership… it’s flying blind.