The attitude towards projects and their management ultimately determines whether businesses succeed or not. Multiple projects that focus on strategic initiatives regarding specific areas of your company will help drive the organization forward, progressing and evolving each year. However, they have to be well-managed.

implementing management reports with a particular project data will narrow your decision-making in certain focus areas, granting you sustainable business results.

A tool that can substantially help you in the process is the project management dashboard. It will make your company more collaborative, cohesive, and profitable by allowing you to take an online data visualization approach to handle your company's strategic activities much better. You will increase your project performance while also increasing the project team's productivity, saving time and costs.

With all of these concepts in mind, we can dive into project dashboards more deeply to understand how they work, and how can you implement them for your business. By the end of this article, you will be able to make one of your own!

Project management dashboards are data-driven platforms that display different stats, metrics, and insights into a specific project by presenting a tailored mix of key performance indicators (KPIs) in one particular project location.

A project management dashboard is perfect for individual departments to monitor the success of their campaigns and make proactive decisions by spotting past or present trends in the business. These decisions will lead to a more intelligent business model.

Project dashboards also serve as a quick point of reference for project managers. They can keep a close eye on project tasks that may be falling behind and take proper corrective action.

There is a lot of information for a project manager to tackle immediately. They need to check on everything happening on the project, and a project management dashboard will give the ideal perspective. It collects data from various aspects of the project, giving the project manager the necessary insights into the project progress.

Even though they might be very helpful even for individual projects, the real deal comes when you juggle various projects that all play into achieving your main objective. It will contain information about a portfolio of projects, and both the project manager and employees will be able to understand and check the performance across all of them quickly.

The project management dashboard (also known as the project status dashboard) can also be used to make specific requests to superiors or other departments. You should focus on a certain section of the project dashboard and generate a graph to make a visually compelling presentation. Follow it with an engaging narrative, and you can get to the point you want across simply and quickly.

A project status dashboard is a powerful online data analysis tool. The essential project information in data form displayed by the tool will help your team members in project planning and project completion. Still, project teams will use it effectively only if it employs the right attributes, qualities, and functionalities.

There are several points you have to tackle to make an effective project management dashboard for all the projects and tasks involved.

Focus on Scannability and Usability

A robust project management tool should always be digestible, visually appealing, well-designed and grant insights in a way that will let you extract value from it in a matter of seconds.

In addition, they should also be user-friendly. Everyone should be able to navigate your dashboards easily, and it shouldn't take technical staff to conduct data-driven tasks and intervene regularly.

To summarize, a well-made project management dashboard will allow every department to work using all the information in a specific project without problems.

Choose Your KPIs

You must always implement the right KPIs for all your projects. Every data source will require you to track specific metrics. While there are numerous project dashboard examples you can pick from, only several KPIs will make sense for your project.

By using a dynamic dashboard for task management, metrics can be combined into a single point of access. From the specific project's status, specified assignments, and team performance, to marketing campaign management, it's crucial to select a few KPIs that can convey a data story and enable you to dive deep into details if needed.

Would It Be an Operational or Strategical Dashboard?

Operational dashboards focus on keeping a record of the current project status in many aspects, such as costs, resources, and deadlines.

Strategic dashboards aim to check the project as a whole, ensure that it stays financially efficient and within the budget, and identify potential risks.

Taking both approaches into consideration is a fundamental step in your project management process, as it will ensure success.

Customize Each Element

The project management dashboard should be fully customizable. You can set the most relevant KPIs for your project while integrating services and platforms that are most useful to your activities. Also, choosing the correct design and layouts will be very helpful for you and your colleagues.

The most important thing here is not to saturate your dashboard with information that won't be relevant, containing too many colors or metrics that won't fit into your story.

Choosing the right KPIs and customizing each element's position and design is an efficient way to present detailed information regarding the project insights, such as its performance and overall progress.

Learn From the Process and Extract Actionable Insights

Once you have a fully functional and efficient project management dashboard, you must go one step further.

Don't stay on just monitoring metrics; extract valuable and actionable insights that will enable you to optimize processes and find several improvement opportunities.

Once the project is completed and done, you can gather the data and analyze it to identify what could have been done differently and prepare strategies for your next projects.

Each project has different intended outcomes or milestones that help you to reach a specific goal. And project dashboards may vary depending on the objectives you are trying to achieve. So, there isn’t a correct project management dashboard template to use when getting started.

But a great project status dashboard must include visuals that will convey overall performance, key project management KPIs tracked in association with such project, and qualitative reports that will add context to any performance report across many aspects of the project.

All will depend on what is important for yo and your project requirements. The way you will present the information may vary, but most project management dashboards will include the following:

• Description: It is always helpful to provide a brief description that explains how and why this project is being implemented, even more for those unfamiliar viewers.

• Status Indicators: With your preferred system, it should always show the project status at a glance. It is evaluated based on the indicators you have selected.

• Owner: There should always be someone assigned as the spokesperson for each project. It allows project managers to have a consistent source of information for any project update and someone to turn to for further information.

• Start and End Dates: With a defined start and end date allows everyone within the project to check if it is on track and when it is expected to be completed.

• Budget: A project status dashboard will make it easy to track spending and whether it is within planned budget limits. It can also forecast the total cost for more projects.

• Qualitative Analysis: Providing details to explain the project's progress will grant important context for dashboard viewers.

• Recommendations: If there are metrics that are going off the track, you could include recommendations on how to address specific issues through real time updates.

• Impacted Goals and Metrics: The project dashboard should show how the projects are in connection to the goals they are linked to.

• Milestones: Your project may have smaller sub-projects that will contribute to the overall success and the bigger picture. They may have individual project tasks. It would be helpful for your dashboard to show these sub-projects or milestones and their associated action items or tasks.

Project dashboards come with many benefits that will improve any modern business organization, regardless of the industry they are working in.

Better Communication and Cohesion

Communication is the key to project management success. If every team member knows their roles, has access to the insights required to perform all the tasks effectively, and understand the data that is presented, your project will likely meet their expectations and desired targets.

Using a project dashboard lets you create detailed analytical reports to connect your strategic activities with all the key attributes.

Centralizes Data

A project could get complicated due to the great number of platforms and touchpoints to consider, together with the significant piles of data that are available at any time.

A project dashboard lets you present and visualize the most relevant data for a particular project, with every insight available in one central location.

It also saves you time and money as you gain access to all of these insights and metrics that are integral to your project without the need to log into other platforms or applications.

It Fosters Collaboration

A project may involve several teams and departments doing conjoint tasks. And sometimes, a team can’t start a new task before other areas have finished theirs.

It is hard to keep everyone in the loop regarding timing and progress. But implementing a project management dashboard will ease that issue. Having all the relevant information in one singular place allows everyone to be well-informed about the status of the different stages that the project is getting into.

It also enables interdepartmental collaboration, leading to a much more productive environment.

Targets Information and Allows To Compare Real-Time Data

An online reporting tool will provide many different angles from which you can check the status of your project. These project dashboards will enable you to pull real-time information whether you need an immediate answer to a particular business question or you simply want to be updated with the latest information.

It also grants the ability to compare different visual data, spot trends, capitalize on particular strengths, identify your project's weaknesses, and improve the chances of success significantly.

Gives You a Holistic Overview of the Project

In the past, you needed to create a traditional report and work with historical data to spot issues and generate insights for the future.

Today, you can make a modern and effective dashboard and have all your touchpoints in a concise and clear visual overview.

It will provide you with a quality backbone to view different angles and ensure sustainable development and overview of your project.

Now that you learned how a project dashboard works, why it is so important to have one ready, and how to make them, it is time to build one of your own.

The best way to make one is to take a project dashboard template and adapt it to your needs. You won't need specialized project management software to do it. You can use a basic program like Microsoft Excel, which is easy to learn and use.

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Project Status Dashboard Template

This template will help you to track and visualize data at first glance by providing a real-time overview of your project’s performance.

After you enter all the relevant data, the pie charts will update to reflect priority percentages and task status to better manage your project.

You can also color-code the Task Timeline to check which tasks are pending and the start and end dates for active tasks, so you can keep your project on schedule.

You can download it as an Excel document from Smarthsheet.

Simple Project Dashboard Template

This dashboard template will track your tasks, time, costs, workload, summary tasks, and the overall status of your project.

It is done more simpler yet more concisely than in other project dashboard examples. But it gets things done, and if you are more comfortable with a simpler dashboard, this one will fit perfectly.

Download it from ProjectManager.

IT Project Dashboard Template

This IT dashboard template provides a snapshot of budgetary allocations, allowing project managers to better oversee expenses for any pending IT task.

Thanks to this IT project dashboard template, they can easily customize and prioritize tasks. You will also be able to report task and project statuses in a visually attractive, single-page format tailored with for IT projects in mind.

Download it from Smartsheet.

Advanced Project Management Dashboard Template

If you are up to the challenge or are familiarized with project dashboards, you can use this advanced template.

It comes with five useful pages. You will have one providing an overall overview of your project status, so you can keep track of it. Then, it uses a Gantt chart to check how well all the project tasks are doing and how they progress.

There’s a project summary to check if you are on schedule for every task. Also, a data sheet where you can see who is in charge of each task and how well they are performing. And last, an advanced overview summarizing all your relevant data on one page.

Download it from AnalysisTabs.

Task Management Template

This template will work perfectly in tandem with any of the other project dashboard templates. As the title suggests, it focuses solely on task management, where you can track how each project task is done and if anyone needs further help whenever they are stuck.

Download it from AnalysisTabs, too.

Choosing proper data analysis methods, paired with intelligence and great communication, will help you to deliver a successful project from start to finish.

By now, you clearly understand how powerful these reporting tools are how to start benefiting from them. Project management dashboards are, without a doubt, your way to surpass your goals and drive your business to new heights.