The Importance of Business Analytics and Dashboards

In this article, we'll analyze commonly overlooked metrics that can help business leaders more effectively measure revenue and productivity.

Tracking metrics allows you to boost overall outcomes and align your employees and operations with company objectives. It offers an actionable method to achieve business goals and strategies. Metrics indicate the extent to which an organization has accomplished its objectives within the planned time frame.

Metrics are specifically important for software development firms, as they are an essential component for cost estimations, performance, debugging, management, and quality assurance. Managers can utilize metrics to pinpoint, prioritize, communicate, and track any concerns to enhance team productivity.

Modern Analytics Offer Extreme Detail and Precision

Business intelligence (BI) solutions combine analytics, data tools, data visualization, data mining, best practices, and data infrastructure to help enterprises make metrics-based decisions. They enable you to get insights into the company that can be used to swiftly adapt to market changes, remove inefficiencies, and drive innovation. Modern BI systems empower business users by delivering self-service assessment, information on reliable platforms, and speedy insights.

In the real world, BI can help a company in many ways. For instance, a mortgage software vendor might leverage BI to comb its vast consumer contact database for precision marketing. Similarly, a social network can utilize BI to process millions of system events each day and create product roadmap decision in real-time.

A properly implemented BI strategy provides a complete overview of an organization to enable departmental leaders to make better decisions. Common business intelligence processes include:

• Benchmarking and performance metrics: Comparing present performance data with historical data to monitor performance against targets by utilizing customized dashboards.
• Descriptive analytics: Leveraging initial data evaluation to learn what happened.
• Data preparation: Collecting several data sources, pinpointing the measurements and dimensions, and making it ready for data assessment.
• Visual analysis: Analyzing data via visual storytelling to deliver insights on-the-fly.
• Data visualization: Using visual representations like histograms, graphs, and charts to more effortlessly consume data.
• Statistical analysis: Further exploring the outcomes from descriptive analytics by investigating stats related to “why” and “how” a pattern happened.
• Querying: Asking information-specific questions and using BI to get the answers from datasets.
• Reporting: Sharing the results of data analysis with stakeholders to enable them to make conclusions and decisions.
• Data mining: Utilizing machine learning, statistics, and databases to discover trends in big datasets.

Key Metrics Included in Most Business Dashboards

Companies are collecting large volumes of data each day for the purpose of analysis to find metrics and insights. They typically utilize dashboards to organize this tsunami of information into understandable and usable material. Dashboards offer helpful insight into an organization’s health and can influence the decision-making of executives.

Dashboards are vital because they organize and condense large volumes of data so that managers and executives can quickly access relevant information. Let's take a look at the metrics used in some common departmental dashboards.

Operations Dashboards

An operations dashboard typically includes the following vital metrics to gauge software maintainability:

• Bug rates: Average amount of bugs generated with the deployment of new features. It enables you to swiftly fix them to deliver value to users.
• MTTR (mean time to repair): It helps determine how quickly can you implement fixes to support consumers.
• Lead time: The period between defining a new function and making it available to users is called lead time. It assists you to measure the performance of your team.

HR Dashboards

HR dashboards present qualitative, internal metrics like employee satisfaction and external, quantitative metrics such as hiring success rates. Larger organizations use HR dashboards to monitor employee retention and turnover. These numbers provide insight to management to ensure that the teams have the required skills for their tasks.

Marketing Dashboards

A marketing dashboard can help you learn if your firm’s marketing efforts are successful at creating new customers or sales. Its high-grade metrics include qualified leads, converted contacts, website visits, and others.

• Qualified leads: The number of qualified leads enables you to separate the wheat from the chaff and focus on promising prospects.
• Converted contacts: The number of converted contacts helps you learn about the leads that your sales efforts have managed to convert into paying customers.
• Website visits: The number of website visits indicates the success of your campaigns to attract leads and prospects to your website.

A detailed marketing dashboard can also indicate when prospects get stuck at your sales pipeline's different stages.

Product Dashboards

A good product management dashboard offers multiple sections and a range of metrics which can be classified into the following types:

Corporate Metrics

• LTV (lifetime value): It is the total income obtained from a customer by your firm over their lifetime association.
• Churn analysis: It is an assessment of an enterprise’s consumer loss rate so you can minimize it.

Sales Metrics

• Booking Trends: It is the value of bookings or sales over a time period.
• Sales rep quota vs. performance: It measures whether a sales rep can achieve a set quota of sales or not.

Customer Service Metrics

• CES (Customer Effort Score): It tracks the ease of customer resolution and interaction during a support request. Companies can track what drives CES to make improvements to the customer experience they deliver.

Marketing Metrics

• Ad performance: It is the number of unique users reached by an ad. It enables you to measure the effectiveness of each ad campaign.
• Website analytics: You can tailor the responses to each visitor based on this information.

Development Metrics

• Escaped defect: It helps count the number of bugs for a release discovered after the launch date. You can swiftly rectify them to boost the user experience.
• Burndown chart: It makes your team’s work visible. It graphically displays the rate of completed work and how many tasks still need to be performed.
• Agile velocity: It is a result metric that indicates the actual value delivered to users in a sequence of sprints.

Engineering Dashboards

As engineering teams build their products in different ways, they need to track different types of metrics. Company leaders can view these metrics and monitor progress.

Engineering dashboards allow you to identify product and development trends and enable teams to decide and act on real-time data. Engineering dashboards typically offer metrics to facilitate agile development, track features, ensure continuous integration, and provide timely delivery. These metrics enable managers to track developer activity, team performance, and project performance.

‍