Implementation Progress Dashboards – Powerful Tools that Influence Decision Making

The experience I have gradually gained by managing product implementations of various sizes and verticals and across geographies, has taught me one of the most powerful modes of communication – “Implementation Progress Dashboards”.   I have observed that Implementation Progress Dashboards play a pivotal role in providing substantiation to customer’s decision making processes during the design, construction and roll-out stages of our implementations.  I have been using this tool for a few years now and with every new implementation, I am trying to improvise on the depictions I chart out in the dashboards.

We, as delegated product implementation heads from the vendor base, are set with the critical expectations of:

• Liaising with stakeholders from the client base working at various levels
• Closely observing and following-up with the implementation progress health in tandem with client managers
• Consolidating and transmitting the information in the best way possible to our counterparts who play a vital role in steering committee meetings pertaining to sign-offs at various phases of the implementation and finally the implementation roll-out schedules.

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Key benefits of Implementation Progress Dashboards:

Implementation Progress Dashboards reinforce our communication mechanism in order to achieve the objectives specified above, by providing us the following key benefits:

1. Simplify Information Visibility – These Dashboards usher straight-forward and comprehensive visibility of information that is expected to be closely tracked during regular implementation management status meetings with customer (be it weekly, bi-weekly or monthly ones).  The information shared provides us a valuable opportunity to handshake and reiterate our commitment towards the common goals we share with our clients as part of bringing a successful closure to the implementation.
2. Enhance Transparency of Progress Reporting – Progress reporting, which normally constitutes one of the core elements of status meetings, is enhanced by the way that dashboards provide a far better transparency of progress, than when it is shared verbally through the meetings or through emails.  For example, when we are poised to go for a full-fledged UAT in the upcoming weeks, the high level plan tracking that may be shared as part of the implementation progress dashboard provides a clear view of where we stand currently and whether we are on schedule for the committed UAT dates.
3. Increase Productivity during Status Meetings – Sending out the dashboard a few hours prior to the regular status meetings will help all stakeholders to review and digest the information ahead of the scheduled meeting.  This coupled with compliance to a good reporting format, while creating the dashboard, thus projecting critical KPIs of project health in a simplified manner, will extensively increase productivity gained through the status meetings.  In other words, a rightly depicted dashboard published in advance of the meeting helps trigger thoughts and discussions on next steps that will supplement considerably in gaining momentum on next level implementation activity.
4. Highlight Pain Areas – Dashboard open up the venue to highlight pain areas both from vendor side as well as client side in a way through which all stakeholders get an opportunity to digest the feedback in the right sense rather than straight away getting into a defensive mode of responses.  For example, a dashboard shared regularly will for sure project certain bottle necks that have been existing for past few weeks that is hindering smooth progress of project execution.  Such substantiated evidence will help stakeholders on any side to understand the gravity of the problem and come up with possible solutions immediately, based on the severity of the issue.
5. Stimulate Decision Making – Critical inputs from the implementation progress dashboards help stimulate easy and diligent decision making from client’s perspective. For example:

• Continuous tracking of functionality to be made available for design / pre-UAT workshops will help client team to take a decision on sticking to existing workshop schedule or to plan to revise the dates ahead of time.  This will avoid last minute surprises.
• Migration progress status for making an environment available for final UAT, helps take decision on accurate real-time production data to be made available in the UAT environment and whether they have been validated and approved.   This helps steering committee to take decisions on UAT schedule planning and tracking.

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Suggested vital components of Implementation Progress Dashboards

• Tracking of Proof of Concept Availability – During design stages, when we are working on Proof of Concepts that need to be implemented and demonstrated per the client’s business needs  / technical requirements, we can make use of tabulations with status of high level tasks that we may track down to get the POC activity to closure.
• Readiness for workshops – Normally, when we go for Design or User Training workshops, we may plan for an agenda spanning across the entire workshop schedule, where functionality of the product will be covered in groups.  As we drive our way through preparing for these workshops, Pie Charts / Progress Trend Charts will help us showcase the health of the preparation activity.  Supported data tables will help show relevant % Completion levels.

• Progress of Customizations being built into the product – Customizations and changes built into the product per client needs as well as configuration / development of interfaces of the product with various external systems in the client environment can also be consolidated by priority, in a list and charts can be included to report out our progress in getting these changes in place.

• Migration Progress – Data migrations and conversions are going to be unavoidable necessity for any product implementation, where our new system is going to replace an existing manual or automated process.   And these migration activities during various phases of client side testing as well as go-live will require involvement of both vendor and client side stakeholders to complete various activities like scripts to be built for data extraction and data loads, actual execution of the scripts, pre-load validation and post data load verification, and final sign-off of data conversion.  Status and progress of these activities can be depicted through progress charts published in the dashboard.

• Go-live Cut-over Planning and Progress Tracking – Preparation for a Go-Live is the most critical phase of the implementation and it definitely needs close monitoring of tasks and activities.  Including related high level plan and tracking them in the dashboard, throughout the whole go-live cut-over period which may ideally span for a week or two,  for sure helps raise customer satisfaction and their boost their comfort level at this most critical juncture.
• Product Set-ups and verification, closure – As part of product installation, we are bound to complete certain critical set-ups in our product so that the system is made usable.  Listing these in a checklist and ticking them off as and when they are verified by client base is a best practice.  Including this list in the dashboard brings in visibility of our system readiness for production usage.
• Summary of Issues being tracked – During the user acceptance testing, we may be using manual or some automated issue tracking tools to track issues to closure.  As part of status meetings during UAT, it is highly beneficial to bring in transparency of an overview of issues that have been raised, worked upon and closed till date.  Including these charts in the dashboard helps in collaborating with the client team and help bringing the issue counts under control.

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Progressive Elaboration of Information in Dashboard

Progressive elaboration of information in the dashboard always helps in bringing in clarity and fluency in interpretation of what we are projecting in the dashboard.  In other words, it is suggested that we elaborate the dashboard with only what is relevant for the given phase or immediate upcoming phase/activity, at a given period.  By following this technique, we will be able to reduce unnecessary noise / distractions in the dashboard data, thus helping client side stakeholders to focus only on what is important for that point of time.

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Summary

In summary, implementation progress dashboards give us the power to reinforce transparency of implementation management information, increase productivity of status meetings, support client side critical decision making, increase customer satisfaction and thus help us build a better rapport with the customer and above all provide ourselves the much needed confidence to steer the implementation to a smooth and seamless successful closure.

Feel free to share your thoughts on your experiences in utilizing progress dashboards and what other kinds of progress depictions you prefer sharing as part of the dashboard data.

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