The Great Dashboard Clean-Up: Roles, Data Owners and Key Result Areas

In the previous blog entry, I commented on the problem: the Salesforce Dashboards I had deployed were not driving change in the organization. At least not to my level of satisfaction. From my vantage point, everyone was looking at the data, talking about the data, admiring the data -- but I didn't feel we were learning anything from the data. I wanted our Salesforce Dashboards to do more -- to influence changes in our business practices.

None of this implies that we aren't already running a highly effective organization -- because we are. Our product (SAFARI C3, a VOIP Media Switching System) crushes the competition with incredible performance numbers -- 99.999% uptime last month, and 99.996% overall for 2008. Our Customer Response Team wildly exceeds our competitors in number of categories: response time, restore time, resolve time, and Customer satisfaction. Despite our success, we do have areas were we can improve -- all organizations do. And that's what I wanted our Dashboards to focus attention on.

Step One: Identify the Roles of Your Target Audience
Identify who is using Salesforce.com and Dashboards in your organization. Group them by role. At my company, Cedar Point Communications, we've embraced CRM fully, so I have users from many different roles in the tool every single day: the Executive Team, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Account Management, Partner Management, Field Services, Project Management, Manufacturing, Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Technical Documentation, and Product Training.

Phew! That's a lot of different user groups!

For each department, I assigned a Data Owner -- usually the department/division manager, or someone they specifically assigned to work with me. Next, I had a group meeting with all of the data owners to outline the project objectives. I then scheduled follow-up one-on-one meetings with each of them individually.


Step Two: Define Key Result Areas for each Role
At the 1:1 meetings, I asked each Data Owner what their Key Result Areas (KRA) were -- what were they hired to accomplish?

From Brian Tracy's Blog:

Each job can be broken down into about five to seven key result areas, seldom more. These are the results that you absolutely, positively have to get to fulfill your responsibilities and make your maximum contribution to your organization. Your failure to perform in a critical result area of your work can lead to failure at your job. There is essential knowledge and skill that you must have for your job. These demands are constantly changing. There are core competencies that you have developed that make it possible for you to do your job in the first place. But there are always key results that are central to your work and which determine your success or failure in your job.

A key result area is defined as something for which you are completely responsible. This means that if you don't do it, it doesn't get done. A key result area is an activity that is under your control. It is an output of your work that becomes an input or a contributing factor to the work of others.

With Dashboards focused around KRA, business unit managers would be able to see, at a glance, how their teams were performing. Each Role / Dashboard Owner would see where their team excelled and what areas needed more attention. The goal was to create Dashboards that influenced process changes within the organization.

Next blog post -- we'll start with the Customer Support team.