Challenge

After establishing its 3-year vision and strategic imperatives the Healthcare company was facing a number of issues because it could not track KPIs of the strategy in centralized location. These issues included:

• Sacrifice of long term strategic investments to meet short term operational targets

• Subjective, “gut-based” decision-making

• A proliferation of one-off dashboards with inconsistent data

• Disagreement around which KPIs should be used to measure enterprise performance

Solution

Working with the VP of Strategy I helped to resolve the performance measurement gap by designing an enterprise performance dashboard. The dashboard provides an overview of metrics affecting enterprise-wide performance to help leaders make coordinated decisions. The dashboard was designed to:

• Clearly communicate vision and strategy

• Provide an objective snapshot of KPIs that tie to each strategic imperative

• Allow users to drill down on specific KPIs to better understand performance

In addition to the dashboard itself I also created:

• Visual rules documentation to maintain consistency as data and measures evolved

• A KPI assessment tool to ensure the right metrics were being measured

Stakeholder Alignment

One of the key issues facing the firm was the disconnect between stakeholders on which KPIs were an “enterprise-level” metric and should be included in the dashboard. To help drive alignment, I created a KPI assessment tool, which allowed leaders to rate metrics across 8 different criteria and would summarize the responses so the group could review, discuss and select KPIs that were most important to strategic vision in an objective and analytical manner.

Co-creation

Knowing that a shared sense of ownership would be key for the dashboard to be adopted throughout the organization I spent time collecting inputs and working along stakeholders to determine what the dashboard could look like.

Communicate a measurable vision

It was clear that executives wanted the imperatives to be a key part of the organization's identity. In order to highlight their importance and tie them to annual goals I created a widget for each imperative with a unique header. The icon representing the imperative would persist in the detail view so users would continue to tie KPIs to the bigger picture strategy.

Sparkline chosen to provide directional performance at a glance without overwhelming the user with labels and keys. The graph leverages color to show performance and differentiate between actual and forecast. A label is also used to indicate performance for accessibility.

Donut chart chose to show progress towards a max value and to maximize space. No status indicator is used because there is no projection for end of year result. metric simply shows the change in value since previous reading to indicate improvement or decline in performance.

Provide Details for Actionable Insights

Each goal had a double click detail view that would allow users to see leading and lagging KPIs that were driving goal performance.

Consistent & Scalable Visual Structure

Data visualization types for each goal and KPI were selected according a set of pre-defined visual rules. These rules were documented to ensure that the dashboard maintained a consistent visual design as metrics and data evolved.