I was chatting with a fellow Comms leader the other day about the difficulty with managing the many disparate job responsibilities that come with the role. Public relations, analyst relations, internal comms, executive visibility, social media – all represent different work streams with types of activities with different development stages.
It can be extremely difficult to keep track of everything without a strong operational framework. Core to that framework should be a strong operational dashboard that provides a view across all functional areas in the Corp Comm remit.
An operational dashboard shouldn’t be confused with a measurement dashboard. The goal of an operational dashboard isn’t to understand the impact of your program but to create greater efficiency in your program execution and ensure that projects are on track.
My operational dashboard is built in Smartsheet, an online collaboration tool, but there are many other ways to do this effectively including Office 365 and other online database programs. The key is to ensure everyone who will create or consume information related to your dashboard has access to your tool. What follows is an overview of how my dashboard works.
In part 1, I outlined the foundation of my dashboard which is series of activity trackers. In part 2, I shared how I use those activity trackers to pull together reports that simplify our workflows. In part 3, I’ll bring it all together in a single dashboard.
Smartsheet has a nice way to build a dashboard using widgets that allow you to insert data, reports, links to external sources, and other web content. But even if you don’t use Smartsheet, you should be looking for a solution that allows you to create a control panel that presents all the information you need to run your program.
My dashboard includes the following:
- Links to my yearly and quarterly plans – My plans are developed in PowerPoint and stored in our company’s collaboration tool (Microsoft Teams). These links allow me to quickly access information about our commitments and assess where we may be falling behind.
- Team calendars – We maintain a single marketing team calendar as well as a more curated version that we share with our sales team. I include links to both of these so I can see if my programs might conflict with or support any of the activities planned across our company.
- Top line metrics – I place two key metrics on the dashboard and our performance against them quarter-to-date and year-to-date. In the dashboard, I also have links to my full measurement panel that I access when I want to drill down and understand our performance but these two metrics provide a quick snapshot and remind me to keep all our activities aligned with our north star.
- QTD and YTD performance on each operational area – I have identified 6 key operational goals for our team: number of release published, earned speaking opps secured, awards secured, analyst briefings/inquiries, articles secured and contributed articles placed. For each of those, I track our performance for the quarter and for the year. I can quickly look at the dashboard and see if we are on track for meeting these operational benchmarks.
- Operational pipelines – For each of the operational goals, I have defined 4-6 stages that each effort passes through on its way to completion. My dashboard displays how many items currently sit in each stage. These pipelines allow me to assess where we might being get hung up in advancing towards our goals and address those barriers. It also allows provides an early warning if we don’t have activity coming into the top of our funnel or if there is not enough late stage activity to ensure we hit our quarterly goals.
- Key reports – In addition to the metrics, I include some drill down reports that provide a quick snapshot of the information that matters most. In our activity reports, we track a ton of information related to each specific deliverable but I don’t need all that information in the dashboard so I build simple reports that bubble up the most important information. For example, in my press release report, I have three columns – the name of the release, whether it has been drafted or not and what stage it is at in the process. I can quickly scan the list to see what might need a push and which releases have a sunk cost in terms of time spent drafting them. If we were a larger team, I might also include who is the current owner so I knew who to contact to get more detail.
- 1-1 meeting agenda – Back in part 1, I described a column in my activity reports called “Flag to Superior” which allowed folks on my team to alert me to anything that was high priority and needed attention. I use that flag to build a report that serves as the weekly agenda for my 1-on-1 with my boss. I can quickly scan the list, select or remove items and drill down to the underlying activity report to read more. At the start of my meeting, I simply open my dashboard and I’m ready to go with a high level overview of the operational health of the corp comm function as well as the specific items I want to discuss.
Thanks to this system, I’m able to track over 175 different activities currently in progress across my small team and ensure we remain highly productive and consistently deliver on our key commitments.
What do/would you include in your operational dashboard? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
