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Scorecard vs. Dashboard
The names ‘Dashboard’ and ‘scorecard’ are well chosen with respect to their real-world usage.
A Dashboard shares on what is happening at this point of time. To take an example, if you are driving your car, the combination of speedometer, RPM meter, Fuel Gauge and Temperature Gauge will be the Dashboard.
A scorecard being part of a broader corporate methodology OR management discipline and is a performance assessment report for a given person, process, team, business unit OR entity with respect to Strategic Business Plan. Typically scorecard is produced for a period of time. When you take your car for service and complete diagnostic check is run on the car to tell you the distance traveled, the oil depletion, engine carbon deposit generation etc. since last check will be the scorecard.
One has to note that a scorecard can have 'at the moment' Measures and Dashboard can have 'Over the period' Measures to achieve their objectives. This is acceptable as long as the core purpose is not compromised.
Example of Scorecard vs. Dashboard
Consider a manager responsible for outbound renewal collection calls at a large enterprise.
The dashboard can have the following measures:
- Number of outbound call in progress vs. number FTEs
- Number of outbound call, which have gone over 5 minutes.
- Number of Outbound calls, which have not got a response in last one hour.
- Number of outbound calls in last one hour, which are resulting in agreement from the customer to pay.
- Number of outbound call where customer has refused to pay.
The Monthly scorecard can have the following measures:
- Mean outbound call duration and weekly trend.
- Standards deviation outbound call duration and weekly trend
- Percentage of calls resulting in agreement from the user to pay.
- %age utilization of calling staff.
- Comparison of the above figures vis-a-vis average of last three months.
- Product wise split of the call duration and call success rates.
Both Dashboards and scorecards have their own merit. Both of them have to be linked to the Strategic Business Plan. Before we get onto how to best design and produce them, lets dwell little more into their differentiation.
- Dashboards help you to manage your business day-by-day, hour-by-hour OR maximum week-by week. Scorecards assess the performance on minimum weekly to fortnightly, monthly and maximum quarterly. (barring some exceptions).
- Dashboards are operational and sometimes tactical, whereas scorecards are combination tactical and strategic. This does not mean the Dashboards are only for operational staff. Head of sales of a company could also be interested to see 'sales Dashboard' on daily basis and may want to drill down to the branches , which have not done well on the weekend sale.
- Dashboards are mostly not used by the project driven businesses like consulting, advertisements etc. because these businesses are not 'line OR retail transaction processing' kind of jobs. Scorecards on the other hand are useful for both.
- As covered in detail for scorecard designing, a scorecard contains a lot of qualitative, deductive, projected data. Dashboards is 95% numbers only.
- Dashboards invoke immediate actions and the kind of actions, which have the outcome period similar to the frequency of the Dashboard. For example if there is a speedometer on your car, it invokes an action of increase OR decrease of speed where the outcome is immediate. You would not like to put the 'Carbon deposit meter' on your Dashboard.
- Just because you have a 'speedometer' OR 'Traffic light' representation on a report does not make it a Dashboard. Similarly a 'tabular data' need not make it a scorecard. There are host of presentation methods, which can be used equally in Dashboards OR scorecards. However, some presentation methods are more suitable for Scorecard OR for Dashboard.
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