You are an Executive, Manager, Business Professional. You Want a Dashboard or a Report

You are an executive, manager, business professional. You want a dashboard or a report. 📉📈

How and whom to ask for it? Well, this post is not about organizational structure and business processes in your organization.

➡️ This post is about how to get what you really need.

❝ I need a dashboard/report with a beautiful design, with a pie chart here, a bar chart there, and maybe a line chart over there. I likely need a graphic designer for the design and a Power BI developer to add the charts. ❞

That’s not what you need. That’s what you think you want because you haven’t yet realized what you really need.

➡️ You need answers to your business questions. You need solutions to your business problems. You need someone whom you can tell, “I need to know where we were losing money last quarter and why. I feel it’s related to the supply chain troubles we had this summer, but I don’t have the full picture. I need to see it now and to monitor monthly in the future.”

You don’t need charts. You’re a manager; you need a solution (meal), not raw ingredients (charts). In a restaurant, you expect that the chef knows how to make the meal and what ingredients to use—they’ve learned and practiced for years. In a hospital, you expect your illness to be treated; you’re not telling a surgeon, “cut here and then stitch there.” There are verified best practices for solving the problem. The same goes for your dashboard/report.

➡️ You need a dashboard/report developer who will understand your problem (not necessarily an expert in your specific industry, just someone with the ability to understand the business problem explained in business terms without any tech jargon).

➡️ You need a dashboard/report that explains the data in the best possible way. You don’t need a “beautiful” dashboard. Beauty is subjective. You need a dashboard that allows you to find answers to your business questions, explaining relevant data, its structure, and its relationships. The layout and chart types should be thoughtfully selected to achieve this in the best possible way.

➡️ You need a clean and clear view of the data.

➡️ You need a data visualization professional.

This is not a graphic designer who knows how to create “cool” designs but has no understanding of data structure and relationships. This is not just anyone who knows how to drag and drop fields to make a pie or bar chart.

This is someone who knows how, when and why charts lie (❗), when and why a bar chart is better than a pie chart, how to format the chart so it tells you, “This! This is why there is a business problem, and this is how to fix it!” instead of, “I’m a beautiful chart, my colors are your brand colors (even though you’re not going to sell me to customers), and I’m here just because the graphic designer thought it would be cool.”

🎯 Do not ask for what you want. You want what you know, and you might not yet know that there is something more efficient. Ask for what you really need.