Two decision dashboards for a development programme team

A country office of an international development agency runs its advocacy work through people, and its programmes through indicators. Both were being tracked, and neither could be seen whole. Stakeholder positions lived in the heads of the staff who met them. Programme indicators sat across reporting cycles, where the question of which ones had slipped, and where, took real effort to answer.

The team needed two things a spreadsheet cannot give them: a current view of where each stakeholder stands, and a view of programme performance that shows the state level picture without a fresh analysis every time.

The first dashboard treats stakeholders as what they are, a set of relationships that move. Each is placed on influence, involvement and commitment, then assessed for readiness to change and for resistance. The predisposition view sorts them into supportive, neutral, ambivalent and resistant. Two comparison views do the useful work: influence against commitment shows who matters and is not yet with you, resistance against readiness shows where effort will actually move something. A tracking table sits underneath so positions can be updated as they change.

The second dashboard works down the results chain, from impact to outcome to output indicators. Every indicator is classified on track, partial or off track, so the summary answers the first question a manager asks before they have to click anything. Beneath it, impact analysis, the strongest and weakest performers, comparison across states, and filtering so a person can narrow to the programme, the indicator or the state they are responsible for.