All-in-one dashboards are dangerous.

I learned that after joining a defence portfolio worth roughly £25bn. The details here have been anonymised and adapted, but the underlying problem is real.

The previous team had spent about a year building a single dashboard intended to explain the whole portfolio. It looked impressive. It contained an extraordinary amount of information. It was also largely useless.

The dashboard was not wrong

The problem was not that the information was inaccurate. The problem was that there was too much of it.

Status fields, scores, milestones, commentary and programme data had all been assembled into one polished view. Almost every individual element could be defended. Together, they hid the thing senior leaders actually needed to see: the decisions.

When the dashboard failed to create clarity, the instinct was always the same. Add another report. Add another field. Ask for another update. Polish the presentation again.

Each addition made the reporting feel more complete while making the real issues harder to find.

Start with the purpose

The team had never paused long enough to ask two basic questions: what counts as valuable data, and what is this dashboard actually designed to do?

If its purpose was to store everything known about the portfolio, it was succeeding. If its purpose was to help leaders make better decisions, it was not.

So we went in the opposite direction.

We spoke to the people actually running the programmes. We found the problems that were real, material and understood on the front line, but which had never been given the spotlight. Then we put those decisions directly in front of the two-star and three-star leaders who had the authority to act.

The reporting became less comprehensive and more consequential.

The test that matters

This is not an argument for less data. It is an argument for knowing why the data exists.

A useful dashboard should make three things obvious:

  • What decision needs to be made?
  • Who has the authority to make it?
  • What will change once they do?

If the people looking at the dashboard cannot answer those questions, the reporting has become the product. The organisation is maintaining an information system rather than improving an outcome.

A dashboard is not an outcome. It is a tool to help you deliver one.

If it does not make the decision clearer, it is just expensive decoration.