Designing Effective KPI Dashboards

I wrote a post on my blog in Dec, 2016 - How to Create A KPI Dashboard in Tableau. It was a Monday and Andy Kriebel published a new data for Washington DC Metro on his Twitter for that week’s MakeoverMonday. I downloaded the data and built a KPI dashboard during the lunch time and published it on my Tableau Public. My colleagues liked the dashboard and asked me the process how I made it, so I wrote the above blog-post. Till today, that post remains the most read article on my blog.

Designing KPI dashboard for businesses might be more challenging than it sounds. I have designed or supervised the design more at least than 500-1000 dashboard to date. So I though if more and more people are interested in the KPI dashboards, I would like to explain part of the process, tips and best practices which I follow to design my KPI dashboards. Though these specifics are best suited for business dashboards, please feel free to make amends to fit them for not-for-profit, government reporting, and to publish information in public domain.

The entire series is divided in 6 parts as follows

Type of KPIs: What are KPIs and what kind of KPIs fit into which requirements
Comparision: Comparing KPIs over time, against peers, and benchmarking against competitors
Drill-down: Drilling down into details to find source of variance, contributing factors and finding causes
Wireframing: Understanding the need of your users and designing the outline of a KPI dashboard
Building KPI Dashboard: Bringing the wireframe to life and build an interactive dashboard in Tableau
Best Practices: Common pitfalls, best practices, and lessons which I have learnt over years

Please sit down and take your time to read. Hope you enjoy reading. If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas, please feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks.