Guide
Project dashboard: which indicators actually belong on it
A dashboard exists to trigger decisions, not to reassure. Six indicators, read by the right audience, beat twenty that nobody acts on.
A project dashboard is a one-page reading of a project’s health, built to provoke a decision. The test is simple: if an indicator has never changed anyone’s behaviour, it is decoration. Most dashboards fail not because they lack data but because they present everything at the same level of importance.
Six indicators are usually enough
Physical progress against planned progress; schedule variance on the milestones that matter; effort spent and remaining effort; committed budget against planned budget; team workload over the coming weeks; open risks and issues with an owner. Together they answer the four questions a sponsor has: are we on time, on budget, adequately staffed, and what could still derail us.
Percent complete is not enough on its own
A task at 80% tells you nothing until you know what remains. Reading progress alongside remaining effort is what exposes the classic pattern of a project stuck at 90% for a month. The pair spent/remaining is far more honest than a single percentage.
One page, one audience
A steering committee needs milestones, budget, risks and decisions to be taken. A delivery team needs the week’s tasks, blocking points and workload. Trying to serve both with the same page produces a document that neither reads. Build two views on the same data instead of one compromise.
The hand-fed dashboard trap
A dashboard rebuilt every month by copying figures into a spreadsheet costs days of work, arrives late, and diverges from the plan the moment someone updates a task. If the indicators are not derived from the plan, the time-entry and the budget, the dashboard will eventually describe a project that no longer exists.
Dashboards in FoxPlan
FoxPlan computes its indicators directly from the plan, the logged time and the budget lines: progress, variance, remaining effort, cost, margin and workload are readings of the live data, at project or portfolio level. A project weather status lets a manager add the qualitative judgement that no metric captures, next to the figures rather than instead of them.
