From the fitness activity tracker on your smartwatch to the console in your car, there are dashboards everywhere. There’s a reason for that.
Studies show that about 80% of people recall things they see, while just 20% retain what they read. Therefore, visual storytelling is a great audience engagement tool.
Every IT team needs a visual tool like an IT dashboard to engage organizational stakeholders.
An IT management dashboard allows teams to track KPIs, stay on top of their projects, and achieve predefined milestones. Without a clear snapshot of progress, IT teams cannot identify what’s working or discover areas for improvement.
But what is an IT management dashboard, and how can you create one for your company?
What is an IT management dashboard?
An IT dashboard is a graphical representation of IT project data. It transforms the raw data into a meaningful story that aligns with the organizations' strategic priorities. By using comprehensive dashboards, IT teams can gain visibility into their projects and make timely decisions.
IT management dashboards have several uses, including:
- Aiding focus on short term goals
- Showing an overview of current performance
- Measuring real-time performance accurately
- Providing a single source of truth for projects
What are the benefits of IT dashboards?
An IT management dashboard tracks data points that are critical for the IT department. Besides providing a holistic overview of the team’s workload, custom dashboards present performance in numbers while providing actionable insights.
Let's evaluate why IT dashboards are a must-have for your IT team:
Improves work visibility
IT management dashboards enhance the clarity and transparency of information.
Every team member knows the project's progress and works towards shared goals. Teams are better placed to respond to business and technology changes quickly.
Saves time
With the availability of simple and easy-to-understand dashboards, team members don't have to waste time collating data from different systems.
Instead, data is drawn from centralized information hubs and displayed in an easy-to-interpret visual layout.
Highlights the value of IT
IT teams have evolved from being a support function to enabling better business performance. A well-structured IT dashboard helps illustrate the IT department’s valuable contribution to the company.
The IT team’s KPIs, budgets, and project performance are a few elements that can be tracked using custom dashboards.
Increase organizational efficiency
Organizations use IT management dashboards to evaluate if IT staff and tools are operating at peak performance.
IT expenses can be documented and tracked per employee and user. Customer-centric metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Number of Users can also be reviewed.
Helps IT teams achieve their goals
Teams often struggle to make sense of data. An IT dashboard organizes the most valuable IT metrics in a single interface.
From this, project managers or Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) can quickly identify smaller issues and address them before they grow into larger problems.
IT dashboard examples
Before you create an IT dashboard, it's important to understand why you’re doing so. You can tailor your IT dashboard depending on your goal or intended audience.
Here is an IT management dashboard example that's customized for a CTO. The CTO’s dashboard gives a clear view into the IT department by measuring internal performance, issues, and financial metrics. This can be useful for:
- Tracking IT team expenses: IT expenses per user or employee can be recorded alongside customer-focused metrics, such as the number of end-users.
- Fixing team issues and learning from them: Team attrition rate, number of critical bugs, and time to close tickets are documented.
- Optimizing internal team performance: This can include reviewing the time to repair, decreasing downtime numbers, creating disaster recovery plans, and service provider efficiency.
What is dashboard reporting?
Dashboard reporting is a graphical representation of a company's business performance using its key performance indicators (KPIs). It sources and displays data from across company departments in diverse formats, including charts, maps, and graphs, to show how work is progressing.
Users can engage with the dashboard data, review trends, and gain valuable insights. You can gain more value, get stakeholder buy-in, and create a data-driven culture across your company through dashboard reporting.
IT dashboard reporting best practices
Consider these IT dashboard reporting best practices to stay organized and boost team efficiency.
- Ensure data validity and relevance: Review data sources based on validity and accessibility and include the relevant information required by the dashboard end-users.
- Prioritize the right things: Choose top-priority goals for the dashboard to ensure alignment of team performance with strategic company goals.
- Keep everything simple: Create easy-to-understand dashboards that organize available data and empower the team with meaningful insights.
- Role-based accessibility: Provide dashboard accessibility to team members based on their roles and requirements.
- Democratize dashboards: Make dashboards available everywhere your team works. That means dashboards should be available across all your apps, websites, or company portals.
How to use Wrike for IT dashboard management and reporting
Quit chasing random numbers or project updates. With Wrike for IT project management, you can focus on the metrics that matter.
Set up a dashboard and add the widgets you need to record and track your tasks. Choose from Wrike’s prebuilt widgets or create personalized ones that match your specific criteria and project needs.
Save time and get more done when you use templates. Whether you need a template for contract management, Agile teamwork, or marketing campaign management, you’ll find them for teams with all kinds of needs. Take the stress out of IT management with a consolidated view of the relevant KPIs.
Optimize problem-solving, cost management, and ticket management for your teams by choosing Wrike for IT service management. Get a free Wrike trial to create role-based dashboards, promote data transparency, and power your IT performance.
