Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

How to Make Really Big Mistakes

Mistake One: Dashboard clutter. Don’t mistake using a dashboard with the idea of “cramming as much data on one page as is humanly possible for my executive to see.” Experienced managers of data know that the dashboard is your instrument panel that will assist you (or an executive) in making decisions based on the gauges and indicators on the dashboard. You’re designing your instrument panel for making decisions. Don’t clutter it up with data you won’t make a decision with.

Mistake Two: Right report, wrong cut of data. You can easily have the right columns and the right rows, but it is entirely possible to make a mistake when selecting what data to use in the report. For example, your executives want to see a real-time view of all open requisitions. However, when you run your report, you select all jobs opened within the month, not all jobs currently open as of the date of the report being run. The difference can be huge. You may have opened up only 10 jobs in March, but on March 30 there are 100 jobs open. While this example is pretty obvious, others are sinisterly difficult to detect. Think about the following cuts of the same data and what they tell you on a report of interview statuses. What is the difference when you select all interview statuses where:

• Only jobs that were closed within the month are reported?

• Only interview statuses that occurred in the month are reported?

• Only jobs that were opened within the month are reported?

• Only jobs that ...