Meet Andrey Pokataev’s guest post. Andrey — is a consultant on strategy and management with many years of experience in Russian consulting companies, as well as in the banking sector.
As a consultant, I was fortunate enough to run the project on the development of Balanced Scorecard for a Russian bank. One of the results of that project was the so-called manager’s personal card — collection of personal Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of a top manager at a bank’s business unit, which indicates its relative weight, plan and percent of actual performance.
Key performance indicators determine how a top manager executes strategic objectives of the bank in its business division. Based on these indicators top manager would receive an additional bonus. So each of the indicators, in addition to the percentage of completion, was assigned with the relative weight on the personal card; those weights should not be less than 5%, so the manager shouldn’t be given too many of the key performance indicators.
Here is an example of such personal card:
As you can see, this is a common table in Excel in it quite a usual state. The client fully agreed with this outcome, because it presents all the necessary information showing clear content, without unnecessary complications.
At the same time, as noticed by Infographer.ru, seeing these raw results looking as a mass of cells, the table becomes difficult to read. Of course, Irina has expressed it much simpler and more succinct: «Tablets… oh.»
Accepting this challenge, based on this table, I decided to make a visual dashboard of a manager in PowerPoint (main instrument to display data). This visual dashboard is automatically updated from the original Excel file (basic tool to calculate data).
And this last point becomes crucial, since it is often necessary to update KPI in several presentations and instantly change its values. Such technique becomes helpful when, for example, the KPI is estimated frequently, or there is a sudden change an hour prior to the presentation in bank’s Boardroom. But, at times, the client is not always willing to pay for extra software. It is fairly easy to implement it with a simple table, but with nice looking speedometers it is not always as simple…
In the end, it took some work, but in result these are three full-working versions of the performance dashboard.
Version 2: Innovative and conceptual
The main visual in this version is the pie chart (constructing instructions), which shows not only the percentage of completion KPI, but also the relative weight of the KPI on a personal card. Looking at this chart, manager can see what KPI require attention and how important these KPI are for him. And again, all data is updated automatically when the Excel file is modified, including the signatures of the chart.
Unfortunately, the diagram itself is still a little unfamiliar. So for clarification, the explanation is provided in gray. In result, we got a visual schedule that catches the eye on the dashboard.
Version 3: Clear and minimal
In this version, I was able to get away from the original data table completely and, without any loss of information, to show the actual values of all KPI as speedometers. Simple, clear and interesting. Moreover, it was possible to show explicit relationship between the indicators and strategic objectives of a top manager. I placed this version of the dashboard third in the presentation specifically for the reader who is tired of tables, which would make him say, «Wow! Cool! «.
Although, the text and the percentages of a personal card are changed manually, it is relatively easy to make them automatically updated from Excel.
In the end, I did what I wanted to do: an obvious and automatically updated dashboard for a top manager. Moreover, I made it in three different versions, so the client had a choose.
Many thanks to Irina Dobrova and Maxim Gorbachevskiy for this blog, which was the main source of information at work. Also thanks for personal consultation!
If you have any questions, I am ready to respond to them in the comments or by e-mail: andrey.pokataev @ rambler.ru.
Andrey Pokataev
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