Srujana Akkiraju

Management dashboard: getting down to business

A Management dashboard is a great way to track and monitor the performance and productivity of an organization at a glance. They are visual representations of quantitative and qualitative data being pulled from various sources(like CRM, HRM, trend reports, customer insights etc).

They typically consist of three screens:

Screen 1: Key result indicators- that relate directly to critical success factors and provide a way for organizations to see at a glance, their performance so far.

Screen 2: Key performance indicators - to monitor current processes and activities. It is real time information that reflects the service quality and productivity.

Screen 3 : Service recovery - potential problems and warning signals aka Damage control

We are at a point in our process where the critical success factors identified from Collaborative Learning Center's mission, vision and values have helped us come up with Key Performance Indicators and Key result indicators. As we go, we are also identifying the sources from which we would pull this information. 

My team and I have been tasked with developing a management dashboard for the Collaborative Learning Center(CLC) department at SCAD. Using SCAD & CLC's mission, vision and value statements, we came up with an initial set of critical success factors and used affinity mapping to identify larger themes. Each of these success factors were weighed against the balanced score card to ensure they had significant impact on various expected outcomes.

After meeting with our client to go over the existing BMP (AS-IS) , the team and I started to refine the AS-IS map and set out to analyze it. We hashed out system breakdowns and Stakeholder  painpoints while looking at the BPM through 3 lenses- Effectiveness, Efficiency and Adaptability. What came out at this point were also various opportunities and ideas for tools and systems. These would help us greatly to design a TO-BE process map. We used the four action framework as a tool to brainstorm the TO-BE map.

Below is the final wall chart developed for this project. The next steps would be to start thinking of critical success factors and key performance indicators in order to create a management dashboard for CLC.

Some questions/learning that emerged out of this process:

With a BPM, you are able to think about multiple stakeholders and their needs.

Unlike a blueprint, the BPM is able to capture at great detail the backend processes. As a tool, it has immense potential to think about how a service is being delivered and how to improve the final outcome for all Stakeholders.

When IBM company comes out with its annual 5 in 5—five predictions for the next five years—people take notice. This year, perhaps not surprisingly given IBM’s commitment to cognitive computing, the company is focusing on smart technologies.

This assignment of ours entails a deep dive into the business process- information and workflow -of the SCAD’s Collaborative Learning Center(CLC). After our initial interview with an employee at CLC, we have been working on identifying the key activities, inputs/outputs and the tools used to carry out these activities in order to generate a high level process map. After dividing their ten week process into smaller chunks of processes, we looked at each process as comprising of macro and micro activities.

Along the way, we have identified pinpoints, breakdowns and even found certain steps that may potentially be eliminated in order to streamline their process.

Once we have the current business process mapped out, we will use the insights generated along the way to create a new proposal for their process.  

Spaces and services are inextricably linked. The physical environment in which a service plays out has a significant influence on the experience of a service. How can a service blueprint visualize the spaces in which front stage actions occur between the customers and employees?  How might the blueprint better communicate the relationship between the space and the activities that the customer and the service employees are performing/producing?