Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 15

How to Ensure Adoption and Drive Positive Change

Making It Work. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort creating a performance dashboard. You have sold the idea, secured funding, and created a team. You have worked diligently with the business to define metrics and targets, standardize rules, and locate data, and you have worked with the technical team to design the architecture, implement the infrastructure, and identify a roll-out strategy. Now you are ready to launch and watch the performance dashboard do its magic.

But will it?

If you have done a good job selling the performance dashboard, expectations are high. Executives see it as a powerful tool to communicate strategy and change the behaviors of individuals and groups. They want employees to work more productively and proactively, using timely information to optimize processes, control operations, and achieve objectives. They want the performance dashboard to foster better collaboration between managers and staff and improve coordination among departments. They view the system as a way to manage performance, not just measure it. To them, the performance dashboard is like a steering wheel that they can turn right and left to keep the organization headed in the right direction.

Two Tasks. To meet these expectations, you still have two tasks to accomplish; the first is obvious: Make sure people use the system! If people do not log in and view the data, the performance dashboard will not have any impact on the organization. ...