5 Key Ways to Optimize Your Project Management Dashboards

A project management dashboard is one of the most effective ways to monitor your project, and it ensures your project’s timely completion and adherence to the budget.

However, project management dashboards can be easily customized to include hundreds, if not thousands, of metrics, and the effectiveness of the dashboard drops significantly. Fortunately, you can optimize your project management dashboard by following these five steps.

1. Create One Dashboard as a Master Project Management Dashboard

Your master dashboard should only contain the key metrics for each of your departments. This will help you avoid adding too many variables to your dashboard, and each metric should have the ability to drill down into an additional dashboard for each department. This prevents you from spending extra time tracking down a problem.

2. Use Systems That Eliminate Data Discrepancies and Errors

When data are compiled from multiple resources and departments, it can become redundant and misinterpreted by some systems.

Your system and dashboard should be set to check for discrepancies between different data points and automatically screen out errors from manual data entry.

3. Make Sure Your Project Management Dashboard Updates Automatically

Many dashboards allow you to set times for updating information. While setting updates to reflect the values nearest to reporting times seems ideal, it can leave you using old, inaccurate data. Your dashboard should automatically update to reflect the most current information available.

4. Set Thresholds to Alert You of Major Setbacks in the Project

Setting thresholds are essential to optimizing your project management dashboard. In the event of a sudden drop in performance or measurement of any metric, the dashboard should automatically alert you of the event. Furthermore, the dashboard should not be static, i.e., it needs to adapt to include metrics relevant to problems when problems arise.

5. Prioritize Metrics by Importance

How your metrics are organized is the most significant part of your dashboard. Your metrics need to be prioritized and flagged for easy identification and review when logging into your dashboard. For example, set a metric near the top of your dashboard to monitor the percentage completed for your project. Alternatively, you may consider adding a metric to track the overall performance of your project. The key is keeping your metrics prioritized to give you immediate answers when logging in.

These five steps are critical to optimizing your project management dashboard. As a result, you need to ensure your dashboard can be thoroughly customized to meet each tactic. In addition, you can increase the efficiency of your dashboard by linking it with your project management software and accessing it from mobile devices. By optimizing your dashboard now, you can manage your project more effectively.

Key Things to Remember

• Your primary dashboard should show general scores for all major departments.
• The dashboard should be based on systems that cleanse data and check data-quality.
• Your dashboard should update automatically, and all information should be as recent as possible.
• Create automatic alerts to notify you of major problems in the monitoring of your project.
• The most important metric you track, such as project performance, should be immediately visible upon accessing your dashboard.