After the success of the performance monitoring dashboard, a new dashboard was conceived, called the “Managers Dashboard”. This dashboard was designed using the same framework that I used for the performance monitoring dashboard.
The idea of this dashboard was to allow mangers to have one place to go view metrics about their department, notably sick time, overtime and financial performance. Vacation tracking was added in later.
Before this dashboard, all the data was available, it was just in various key systems. By creating a unified and consistent interface, we were able to present the data to a manager in a meaningful format, and also augment it with additional details that they might find useful. The key part was presenting the basic information to them on a single screen, that contained a lot of information relevant to them, but colour coded so they knew if they needed to take action.
This was a fun project, and one that I took the lead in helping design both the data required in the back-end, and also the front-end navigation. The highlight of the dashboard, that many managers found very insightful, was a calendar of an employee’s work history, colour coded by day depending on the type of work done. Filters could be applied, and this allowed the manager to figure out trends in an employee that might be considered suspicious, such as always calling in sick the day before a long week-end or a vacation. Previously a manager had to remember if this happened, and follow-up with HR, now they were able to investigate this information and then talk to HR if they saw a problem. HR staff had access to the same dashboard, so they were able to see what a manager saw, and verify that there might be an issue that warranted discussion.
Video to come