Control Panel: Dashboard	Help Home Page

The dashboard is an important piece of functionality that allows users to obtain a custom view of any part of the organisation's system at a glance without having to do any more than login to the Escendency system. Users can then access reports directly by clicking on the relevant dashboard graphics.

Note: The system administrator will need to configure relevant users to have access to the dashboard tab (see customise control panel help).

If assigned, the dashboard will appear as the first tab on a user's control panel by default. Until personal settings have been configured the default dashboard will show three pie chart graphs, the first displaying the overall breakdown of performance through the organisation, the second and third showing personal performance for owned and measured targets. These charts can be clicked on to drill through to the existing Indicator Status Distribution reports.

In most cases, users will want to customise their dashboard so that it reflects those parts of the organisation they have responsibility for (figure 1 - click on graphics for help on reports).

Figure 1: Example of a customised dashboard showing 2 performance gauges, 2 assessment charts, one performance chart and two action plan gauges (one detailed one simple). Click on the graphics to drill down to the assessments, performance or action plan summary reports (this mimics the actual navigation on the dashboard although further drill down would be possible from the PI and action plan summary report on a live system).

Customising the Dashboard: Users can customise the information that is displayed on the dashboard by clicking on the artists palette icon on the top left of the dashboard, this will open the customise dashboard display page. This action can be mimicked in figure 1 by clicking on the palette icon (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Customise Dashboard Page

The Customise Dashboard page is split into a number of sections:

Strategy Map Items: Clicking on the select button will open a new window displaying the full strategy map. Users can select which items they would like to see displayed as gauges on the dashboard. For these changes to be reflected on the dashboard, the user must select 'Save' at the base of the item selection (figure 3) and then 'Save' again on the customise dashboard page.

Figure 3: Strategy map item select page example (truncated).

Action Plans: Clicking on the Action Plans select button will open a new window displaying the full list of action plans in the system (figure 4). Users can select which action plans they wish to see displayed on the dashboard (figure 1) and will then be returned to the Customise Dashboard Page where they can make further modifications to the display before saving the settings.

The 'Include related action plan tasks' check box will additionally display the total number of tasks in all the action plans related to the plan selected.

The 'Show detailed action plan status' check box will display a separate bar for overdue, completed and approved action plan tasks. The unchecked default is one bar showing the total number of completed and approved tasks that shows red if even one task is overdue, green if at least one task is completed, and blue when all tasks are completed and approved.

In practice, most users are likely to display action plan gauges with both checkbox options checked.

Overdue tasks are red, completed are green and approved are blue. Once a completed task is approved it is removed from the green bar and added to the blue bar. A fully approved action plan, therefore, will be one blue bar extending the length of the graphic.

The action plan gauges (default and detailed), unlike the performance gauges, can be clicked on to drill down to the action plan summary report (see also Action planning help for more information).

Figure 4: Action plan selection page example.

Counters: User can select counters that show the number of measurement and validation tasks and/or the number of action plan tasks that they are responsible for by checking the relevant checkboxes shown in figure 2.

Performance Breakdowns: Users can select which, if any, of the default pie charts are displayed. All these charts will drill down to performance graphs (see figure 1 for example).

Display Settings: Users are able to configure how large their gauges are displayed (from a range of settings) and how many gauges are displayed per row. Note: Graph sizes are not set in absolute size terms, but as a proportion of the actual screen resolution, this means that a user's settings should remain suitable even if they log on from a machine with a different screen resolution.

It is also possible to select how data ranges display on gauges, the options being to show the scale as a percentage of possible achievement, or to show the actual performance score as calculated by the system (in practice most users will select the percent option). Note: It is important to realise that the performance gauge is showing performance status at time of viewing and not the percentage of a target completed. The action plan gauge does show the proportion of tasks completed and / or approved.

The following illustrations show a couple of possible layouts for the dashboard:

Figure 5: One large gauge showing the overall performance at the top level of the strategy map.

In figure 5 the main needle pointer shows the current performance score as calculated by the system. On the outside of the coloured gauge is a diamond shaped pointer. This displays the previous performance score (if there has been a change), which makes it possible to see if performance is improving or deteriorating without having to wait for a change in overall status.

It should be noted that the scores attached to performance gauges are a reflection of the internal calculations performed by the system in order to assign a status to non-measurable parts of the strategy map. It does not follow that (for example) a score of 50% at the vision level implies that 50% of measurable items have been achieved but only that the organisation is at 50% of where it should be at this time.

Figure 6: Small gauges showing a number of strategy map items along with pie charts.