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Hi All,

 

I’m writing to see if anyone has any tips on reigning in dashboards and reporting with their executive team. Right now, we have over 760 active reports and 46 dashboards. My executive team wants to see every report broken down by product, region, service tier, solution, program, as well as over time.

 

In addition, they don’t want to use global filters because they want the graphic to show comparisons over each of these characteristics above.

 

Because there’s a limit to 30 widgets on a dashboard, I have to create an Executive Dashboard 1, Executive Dashboard 2, etc.

 

It’s been overwhelming maintaining this much reporting and dashboards for our teams (especially when we’re still new to Gainsight and foundational changes are still being made).

 

I’ve tried to narrow the scope and focus our leadership team on (1) Defining the purpose of the dashboard (2) understanding what KPIs should be included (3) and align on the appropriate design.

 

Then, if they need ad-hoc reporting, I can always create reports and send.

 

However, I’ve had push-back. I’m writing to see if anyone else deals with this and if they have any suggestions!

 

Thank you!

Sarah

@sarah.kenney No magic formulas for you, other than I think you’re pressing on all the ideal buttons: Asking for business purpose, Clarifying KPIs, Global Filters for consistency and scalability.

The ask to break down every item on all those dimensions is a tall one. When I receive blanket requests like that, I try to guide my stakeholders into “agile mode”, where I build something that’s serviceable. Then I listen for the questions and “the buzz” that comes up around the reports. Else it’s very easy to spend extraordinary effort building perfect (and to your point, multiple) dashboards which it then turns out are rarely used.

I try to frame with “Try this to start; if we find you have many questions here, we’ll go deeper on that.”

Your CS instance has some insights into who is using what, in the GS Usage Asset Tracking object. It’s a little rickety, but it will start to arm you with which Dashboards are actually getting trafficked, and which ones aren’t. That may provide you some leverage to share how much effort you’ve put into maintaining 46 dashboards, where 36 of them (or whatever you find) are seeing minimal usage. 

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