Читать книгу Excel Dashboards & Reports For Dummies - Michael Alexander - Страница 18

When you have the list of measures that need to be included on the dashboard, it’s important to take a tally of the available systems to determine whether the data required to produce those measures is available. Ask yourself the following questions:

 Do you have access to the data sources necessary?

 How often are those data sources refreshed?

 Who owns and maintains those data sources?

 What are the processes to get the data from those resources?

 Does the data even exist?

These are all questions you need answered when negotiating dashboard development time, data refresh intervals, and change management.

Conventional wisdom says that the measures on your dashboard shouldn’t be governed by the availability of data. Instead, you should let dashboard KPIs and measures govern the data sources in your organization. Although I agree with the spirit of that statement, I’ve been involved in too many dashboard projects that have fallen apart because of lack of data. Real-world experience has taught me the difference between the ideal and the ordeal.

If your organizational strategy requires that you collect and measure data that is nonexistent or not available, press Pause on the dashboard project and turn your attention to creating a data collection mechanism that will get the data you need.