Specify a dashboard before anyone builds it

short · 30 min · Objective 4.2

Task

Write the specification a dashboard should start from -- who it is for, what kind it is, and at most five KPIs, each defined well enough that someone else could recalculate it.

Steps

  1. Choose an audience, for example a sales manager checking yesterday's orders.
  2. Write lab/dash/spec.json with the keys audience, type (one of operational, strategic or analytical), refresh and kpis.
  3. Make kpis a list of at most five objects, most important first, each with a name, a definition, a source and a target.

Verify

These checks run in a POSIX shell with Python 3: Terminal on macOS or Linux, and on Windows Git Bash (it comes with Git for Windows) or WSL. On Windows, python3 is often a Microsoft Store placeholder that prints “Python was not found”; run alias python3=py in Git Bash first.

python3 -c "import json; s = json.load(open('lab/dash/spec.json')); k = s['kpis']; print('type ok:', s['type'] in ('operational', 'strategic', 'analytical')); print('kpis:', len(k), 'at most five:', len(k) <= 5); print('complete:', all(all(x.get(f) for f in ('name', 'definition', 'source', 'target')) for x in k))"

The type is one of the three, there are at most five KPIs, and every one has a name, a definition, a source and a target. A KPI without a definition and a source cannot be validated later -- which is the whole of objective 4.3.

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