Get insights into your projects metrics so you can track progress

When it comes to building out the right dashboards for your team, seeing what others are doing can provide some guidance and spark new ideas.    Starting today, we’ll be sharing what other BrightGauge users are building out in our Dashboard of the Month series. Check back each month to see what key performance indicators (KPIs) are being tracked and for guidance on how to recreate the dashboards for yourself.    July’s Dashboards were submitted by Brad Schultz of IT Management Associates from Perth, Australia. Not only do ITMA’s dashboards really pop off the screen, they serve a major daily purpose for Brad and his service delivery team.     Brad states the objective of these dashboards is to provide up-to-date information on tickets, hours entered, SLA stats and survey responses.  These KPIs help his team stay on top of different ticket queues while fostering a bit of friendly competition to ensure time is being entered, tickets are being closed, and most importantly, that ITMA’s clients are happy.   We chose ITMA’s dashboards because they do a great job breaking up and displaying data designed for in-office displays.  Brad’s usage of rotating dashboards, color thresholds, and labels enact our Dashboard Best Practices, allowing his team to easily identify, assess, and act in real-time while simultaneously tracking weekly team performance.   Brad and his team use ConnectWise Manage to view their data and to build their dashboards, but the same metrics can be tracked using other PSA tools like Autotask.   Think this dashboard will be helpful for your team? Reach out to success@brightgauge.com if you’d like to recreate this dashboard for yourself and we’ll be happy to provide the guidance you’ll need.    Thank you, Brad & ITMA, for sharing your Service Delivery Dashboards with us!   P.S. Also reach out to success@brightgauge.com if you want your dashboard to be featured in an upcoming post.

We're constantly thinking about upcoming quarters and projections for the future. Something that we firmly believe in is decluttering and beginning a new cycle with a fresh start. Whether it’s a change in seasons or a new fiscal year, the benefits of decluttering are big. In this post, we’ll share tips for how to clean up your BrightGauge accounts so you can work more efficiently and deeply. BrighGauge ‘spring cleaning’ tips Think of this as a lesson in spring cleaning, but for an app. We all lead busy lives and when it comes to our data, we want to get what we need as quickly as possible. Because of this, we’ve found that BrightGauge users tend to let their gauges and dashboards stack up, instead of taking some time to delete ones that are no longer used or needed. It’s kind of like when we save every single file to our hard drive and forget to clean out some of those files every now and then. That kind of clutter serves no value or purpose to us. There are several ways you can clean up your BrightGauge to get rid of unnecessary mess and to ensure that you’re using its features as optimally as possible. Doing this will make your BrightGauge a lot more manageable.   1. Delete what you don’t need  Make time to go through your list of gauges and dashboards and take stock of what’s still of use to you and your team. Do you have duplicate gauges? Sometimes when we’re building a gauge, we forget that we had already attempted to create a similar one, so make sure to delete the superfluous ones. Do you have years-old gauges? Do they need to be updated or are they totally irrelevant? Click on your ‘Unused Gauges’, which are gauges that are not being used on any dashboards, reports, or goal lists. Is there any reason you still need these? Look through your team members’ folders. Are there any employees who no longer work at your company? Are their gauges still being used?   2. Consolidate what you can  When you are in your Gauge Builder, are you configuring your gauges to look at more than one piece of data? If you’re not using layers, you may be creating more gauges than you need. Layers are great for when you want to see a comparison in your data. For example, you may want to see how many tickets your techs have resolved this month versus last month. You’d simply create the 1st layer of ticket stats for the current month and then you’d create a 2nd layer of ticket stats for last month. The data would be displayed side by side in a column chart (or bar chart if you wish). This is a much better use of your gauges than if you had created one separate gauge per month. Likewise, if you’re using separate dashboards for similar data, you probably want to consolidate your metrics into one seamless dashboard. You wouldn’t want to look at Currently Open Tickets, Tickets in New Status, and Tickets Opened This Week in one dashboard and then Ticket Response Time and Tickets by Type in another. Try to put it on a single pane of glass when possible.   3. Be more efficient with your gauges and dashboards  First and foremost, make sure your dashboards are displaying only the gauges you need. Think of your dashboard like your desk. Too much clutter causes anxiety and can make you less productive. Too many unnecessary gauges on a dashboard make it harder to get the exact snapshot of data you need. We have features that make it easy to get really specific so that your insights are sharper and more conclusive. Make sure you’re taking advantage of these. Calculated metrics allow you to create formulas in your gauges, the way you would in Microsoft Excel (please note, you need to be on our Enterprise Plans to access this feature). As an example, you can use a calculated gauge to return your Kill Rate % by dividing Tickets Closed Today (layer 1) by Tickets Opened Today (layer 2). This saves you time and gives you a clearer idea of where you stand. Make sure your gauges are utilizing this feature when applicable. Similarly, if you’re not filtering your gauges, dashboards and reports, you may be looking at excessive or non-specific data. There are 4 filters you can limit your data by: date, text, number, and boolean. A common example is to take a metric or KPI and filter it by technician, so you can evaluate their performance in a streamlined manner. This is especially useful if you have lots of direct reports. Pro ‘spring cleaning’ tips: Use linked filters to edit the same filter across multiple gauges. Read about how to do that here. Exclude filters from your dashboards and reports when you need to. Read about how to do that here.   4. Disconnect datasources you're no longer using  If you still have access to a datasource that integrates with BrightGauge, but you aren’t really using it anymore nor do you plan to in the future, just get rid of it! No sense in holding on to something you don’t need.   5. Automate your reports So many of our clients tell us that our client reporting feature has been a complete game-changer. It is so easy to create custom, interactive reports in just a few minutes. But, make sure you’re taking full advantage of this feature. Once you’ve created a report once, you can save it as a template, and you can schedule it to go out on a recurring basis to the exact recipients you want, on the date and time you choose. This is perfect for daily, weekly, or monthly reports that you need to send to various clients. Recipients can’t see who is cc’d on reports, so no need to worry if you’ve got multiple people receiving the same report.   6. Set up your client mappings Make sure you’ve got your client mappings properly set up. We can’t stress enough what a huge time saver this can be for you. This is great to do if you integrate with multiple datasources, but your client names appear slightly differently across those datasources. Client mappings help you tell your data who’s who, which is of significant value when you’re sending lots of reports out! Here’s a client mapping video to make sure you’ve dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s.   7. Archive old goal lists  We know how exciting it is to hit your goals and have an amazing quarter. Kudos to you when this happens. But instead of holding on to the past, work towards the future! Archive or delete the goal lists that you are no longer using and make space to absolutely crush new goals. At BrightGauge, we only keep up goal lists for the current quarter. Makes it easier to focus on the current task at hand. Being organized will make a huge difference down the line You might think you don’t have enough time to go through a ‘spring cleaning’, but trust us when we tell you that it’ll save you a ton of time later on. Plus, you’ll be working within BrightGauge much more efficiently, which will make data insights and analysis a whole lot less overwhelming. It’s worth dedicating time to this so you can head into each day a bit tidier and a lot more prepared. For more tips on cleaning up your BrightGauge, check out our webinar, 'Best Practices for Organization and Account Cleanup'.

Being able to track data is crucial for measuring employee performance and identifying opportunities for improvement. However, there is such a thing as trying to keep track of too much data at once. Trying to monitor too many different key performance indicators (KPIs) at once can easily lead to data bloat, which is something to be avoided. Why should you clean up your KPI list as soon as possible? Here’s an explanation of why, as well as some advice for cleaning up KPI lists. Why you should clean your KPI lists 1: To stop data bloat The major issue with data bloat of any kind is that it can distract you from the performance metrics that matter most to your business. The problem is that data bloat doesn’t happen overnight—it creeps up on you slowly and steadily. For example, it can start with a single employee performance metric that you use for a single project. Then, you forget to do anything with it and keep adding more and more KPIs to the list for future projects. One day, before you realize it, your KPI list is full of performance metrics you never use. When you go through your key performance indicators to look for metrics to measure employee goals, this data bloat makes the task take much more time to complete. Periodically cleaning up your KPI lists to get rid of unused performance metrics is crucial for stopping KPI bloat in its tracks. This, in turn, can help simplify data management tasks and save you time on measuring KPIs in the future. 2: To focus on your most important employee goals Another reason to prune some employee performance metrics from your KPI list is to increase focus on your most important employee goals. For example, is your business’ overall goal to increase revenue? If that’s the case, then you may want to delete some employee metrics to focus on ones that contribute more towards revenue growth. At the very least, tweaking the data dashboards you use for employees to reflect these new priorities can be helpful for motivating them, even if you don’t delete the performance metrics from your KPI list. Choosing which employee performance metrics to remove So, how can you ensure that you’re keeping the KPIs that matter and only deleting the performance metrics that you don’t need from your KPI list? It can help to ask yourself the following few questions: Do I know what the KPI was being used for? If you don’t know the purpose of a KPI in your list, odds are that tracking the KPI is a waste of time and effort. Being able to understand the purpose of a performance metric is crucial for using it to improve your business. Is the KPI relevant to my business’ goals? KPIs that aren’t relevant to your business’ goals probably shouldn’t be taking up valuable space in your KPI list. Irrelevant metrics do little more than create data bloat and waste time. Does the KPI help me hold better discussions with my team? A KPI that helps you have better meetings with your team members so you can help them meet their employee goals may be worth holding on to. Can I measure the performance metric objectively? To be valuable, a key performance indicator has to be objectively measurable. For example, “Having a positive, upbeat attitude towards customers” sounds good in theory, but it isn’t an objective standard that can be measured—positive results in customer satisfaction surveys is. Is the employee performance metric something an employee can control? Measuring KPIs for employees that are beyond their control—like the number of customers that walk into a retail store’s doors or the number of calls that are made to a call center—is unfair and demoralizing. While these metrics might be worth tracking for assessing issues with the business, they shouldn’t be part of employee performance-focused KPI lists. Consider reorganizing your KPI list Aside from simply removing unused or unnecessary KPIs, consider reorganizing your KPI list to make it easier to browse in the future. For example, you could arrange your KPIs in order of importance to put the ones you most frequently reference in 1:1 employee meetings at the top of the list (or organize them into employee data dashboards). You could also organize KPIs in alphabetical order to make them all easier to find when searching for a specific metric that isn’t used frequently, but is still important enough to keep in the KPI list. Another idea is to create different KPI lists that are specific to each team or department within the organization. For example, creating a KPI list just for the sales team would allow you to stuff it full of sales-oriented performance metrics. Meanwhile, a services team-specific KPI list could be used to track an entirely different set of metrics that are more meaningful to that department. Creating multiple lists has the benefit of making it easier to keep each list short, making the data therein easier to manage for each team. However, some KPIs may be repeated between multiple lists. Here, having a solution for automatically updating KPI data in lists can be invaluable for saving time and effort. Do you have a preferred method for managing which KPIs you track? Or, are you curious about how you can improve KPI tracking for your business? Reach out to BrightGauge today to let us know!