We’ve all been there! You are sitting at your desk innocently working away when all of a sudden a meeting invite arrives with the subject line “Dashboard Requirements Meeting”. Your first instinct may be “awesome, a new project AND they have requirements, or at least want to talk about them! Better than the last time when they just gave me a dataset with no requirements and say ‘make a dashboard’ right?”
You arrive at the meeting and the discussion begins… oh no… now what?
Can you make this look like Excel?
Over the summer I wrote an extensive blog post on this very topic mainly because it is the most common request I’ve seen. The TL/DR of that post is that you have multiple strategies you can employ to avoid this request which includes:
- Find someone above the requestor in the hierarchy who receive this data and see what they want and try and convince them to go visual
- Find an evangelist who loves data visualization and will help encourage their peers to move away from the tabular approach
- Present an alternative view – create their tabular request and an actionable dashboard, and present the dashboard first.
- Subtly add some preattentive attributes to their tabular report so you ease them into data visualization
This is hard do to the fact that people hate change and Excel is the warm comfy blanket that comes with hot chocolate and marshmallows… and no one wants to have their blanket and hot chocolate taken away from them! It’s like dealing with a small child, encouraging them they don’t need a night light, and then they don’t need you to tuck them in. Do it gradually and eventually, they will forget all about tabular reports… maybe.
What I want is a pie chart (or whatever chart is the flavor of the month)… OR This visual has to be this chart type! (It’s completely the wrong chart type)
When stakeholders are asking for specific chart types, or the wrong chart types it can be frustrating. This is all about education and again, comfort with what they may know. Pie charts are as common as dirt, and generally, they are as replaceable with something better. Educating your stakeholders on “Right Chart, Right Time” can be a huge game-changer. My favorite tool for this has become the Visual Vocabulary created by Andy Kriebel (adapted from the Financial Times).
Please color each category (there are 20+) on the dashboard.
I want all these metrics on a single dashboard (there are 20+)
How do I export to Excel?
How do I export to PowerPoint?
I want to be able to filter by Customer (there are thousands!)
I need a dashboard that has all our data points so I can answer all my questions…
I need a “Stop Light” scorecard/dashboard (Red/Yellow/Green)