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Part of Designing dashboards that earn a permanent place on someone's screen

The dashboards questions that keep coming back

Dashboard questions for an inherited estate: fifteen to ask about the numbers, the reader and the page, and the four decisions the answers point to.

Policy Desk · · 6 min read

You have inherited somebody else's dashboards. A team moved, a person left, two departments merged, or you have simply been handed a folder with sixty pages in it and asked to sort it out.

The decision on each page is one of four: keep it, fix it, merge it into another, or retire it. These fifteen questions get you to that decision without needing to have been there when it was built. Work through one page at a time, and expect most of them to take under ten minutes.

What to take away

  • Four outcomes onlykeep, fix, merge, retire. Anything else becomes a page that stays because nobody decided.
  • The first three questions resolve most of the estate. Do not run all fifteen on everything.
  • A page with no living owner and no identifiable reader is a retirement, whatever it looks like.

The three that usually settle it

1. Who opened this in the last quarter, and how many distinct people? If the answer is nobody, propose an archive. If it is one person, this is a personal report and should probably be sent to them instead of published.

Three questions that settle it

Who opened this last quarter?

Yes

Nobody -> propose an archive

No

One person -> send as personal report

2. Who owns it, and are they still here doing that job?
Ownership decays silently. A page whose owner changed roles a year ago has no one to answer questions about it and no one to approve a change.
3. What decision does it support, and does that decision still get made?
Reorganizations retire decisions without retiring the artifacts built for them. This is the most common reason a well built page becomes dead weight.

Questions about the numbers on it

4. Where does the primary number come from? A governed model, a source system, or logic defined inside this page. The third is the one that creates future disagreements.

Audit the numbers on the page

  • Where does the primary number come from?
  • Does it define a concept defined elsewhere?
  • What does it exclude?
  • When did definitions last change?
  • Is there an accurate freshness indicator?
5. Does anything here define a concept that is defined elsewhere?
Two pages computing the same idea differently is the specific defect worth hunting for, because it surfaces in meetings rather than in monitoring.
6. What does it exclude?
If nobody can say, the page cannot be trusted for anything consequential until somebody reads the logic.
7. When did the definitions last change, and was the page updated?
Charts keep rendering after a definition moves underneath them. Nothing breaks; the meaning just quietly shifts.
8. Is there a freshness indicator, and is it accurate?
Test it by checking the underlying data against what the page claims. A stale page that says it is current is worse than a broken one, and freshness is exactly the kind of metadata that has to travel with the number rather than live in a policy.

Questions about the reader

9. Can the intended reader explain the page without help? Hand it over with no introduction and ask what it is for. This takes two minutes and is the most informative thing on this list.

Test the intended reader

  • Can they explain the page without help?
  • Do they export it, and what next?
  • Do they get the answer here?
  • Would an alert serve them better?
10. Do they export it, and what do they do next?
The step after the export is a requirement the page does not meet. It is often the reason a page is used at all.
11. Do they get the answer here, or do they ask someone anyway?
Questions that arrive despite the page tell you what it fails to answer.
12. Would an alert serve them better?
Anyone checking a page on a schedule to see whether a threshold was crossed wants a notification and has been given a website.

Questions about the page as an object

13. How many other pages overlap with it? Group by decision rather than by title. Overlapping pages usually merge into one page with a filter, which is a large win and an easy one to justify.

Audit the page as an object

  • How many other pages overlap with it?
  • What breaks if an upstream column is renamed?
  • If archived today, who would notice within a month?
14. What breaks if an upstream column is renamed?
If the answer is that a tile silently empties, the page needs a test on the data underneath rather than a fix on the page.
15. If you archived it today, who would notice within a month?
Ask it as a thought experiment before you do it. The names people produce are the real audience, and they are frequently not the audience it was built for.

Turning answers into one of four decisions

What you foundDecision
Real reader, real decision, sound definitionsKeep, and record the owner
Real reader, real decision, definitions defined locallyFix, by pointing it at governed definitions
Overlaps another page serving the same decisionMerge, and redirect the readers explicitly
No reader, no owner, or a decision nobody makesRetire, with an announcement
One reader checking for a thresholdReplace with an alert

Announce every retirement rather than deleting quietly. The announcement is what finds the reader you missed, and it costs one message.

Doing this at scale without stalling

Sort the whole set by last opened date and start at the bottom. The unopened tail is large in most estates and clears quickly, because questions one to three are usually enough.

Timebox the middle. Anything that takes more than twenty minutes to decide goes in a pile for the owner to defend, and the pile is reviewed once. Pages nobody defends retire on schedule.

Keep a short record of what you retired and why. When someone asks for it back in six months, that record turns an argument into a two minute answer, and occasionally into a legitimate rebuild.

Related reading on this site

For design decisions on a page you keep, see dashboard design. Questions one, nine, and eleven cover the manual side of measuring whether a page works. Rebuilds should start from the one page specification.

Ownership, definitions, and change control belong to data governance. Several overlaps you find are the recurring shapes in patterns in intelligence work.

Common questions

How long does an audit of sixty pages take?

A few days spread over a couple of weeks, most of it on the small number of pages that are genuinely contested. The unopened tail goes fast.

Should we archive or delete?

Archive. Deletion invites an argument you cannot settle, and an archived page can be restored in minutes if the announcement finds someone who needed it.

What if the owner refuses to retire anything?

Ask them to name the reader and the decision for each page they are defending. That converts a general objection into a specific list, and the list is usually much shorter than the folder.

We inherited pages in a tool we are leaving. Does this still apply?

More so. Migration is the cheapest possible moment to retire things, because the default becomes not moving a page rather than deleting one.

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