Choosing five indicators instead of twenty
A dashboard with twenty indicators is a report nobody reads. The discipline that makes one useful is deciding, for each candidate metric, what decision it supports and who takes that decision — and dropping every metric that cannot answer both.
For a professional services team five usually suffice: billable utilisation, delivery against committed dates, project margin, work delivered but not yet invoiced, and pending timesheets. Each maps to an action somebody can take this week, which is the only property that keeps a dashboard alive after the first month.
- Every metric tied to a decision and a decision-maker
- Five indicators at most on the primary view
- Detail available on demand, not shown by default
- Metrics without an owner removed rather than kept