Executive dashboard: 12 useful indicators for decisions

Choose the signals before the screen

A useful dashboard connects a signal to a decision. Before choosing charts, ask what you need to decide about: sales activity, delays, quality or team workload. The twelve indicators below are a menu, not a requirement to display everything.

For each indicator you choose, set a definition, source, period and owner. A trend can only be interpreted if the calculation remains comparable.

Observe sales activity

These three signals help distinguish incoming enquiries, decisions secured and commercial commitments. Read them over a period suited to the sales cycle.

• 1. Qualified enquiries. Number of enquiries meeting the team's defined criteria. If volume rises but those criteria are no longer met, revisit qualification.
• 2. Proposal acceptance rate. Accepted proposals among those with a recorded decision, within the same group of cases. Show pending proposals separately to avoid a misleading rate.
• 3. Value of signed orders. Total confirmed orders during the period, using a consistent rule for cancellations. Do not confuse it with invoiced or collected amounts.

See delivery bottlenecks

Observe delivery against agreed commitments and work in progress. Compare similar cases rather than combining very different services.

• 4. Delivery within the agreed time. Share of cases delivered on time among those due in the period. Keep a record of extensions agreed with the client.
• 5. Median processing time. Time between two defined stages, such as order approval and delivery. Also check the longest-running cases: a median can hide exceptions.
• 6. Cases awaiting approval. Number of cases blocked by a decision, with their age and expected decision-maker. This signal helps target the decisions that release work.

Track actual quality

More completed work is only useful if the result remains usable. Define rework and incidents before comparing figures.

• 7. Share of cases requiring rework. Cases needing an error-related correction among delivered cases. Separate these corrections from changes to the original request.
• 8. Open customer incidents. Number of unresolved incidents, with age and severity. A total alone does not show whether important cases are being addressed.
• 9. Recorded correction time. Time actually logged correcting errors during the period. It helps identify recurring defects; it does not by itself establish a financial loss.

Check capacity and data

These signals show whether the work plan is realistic and the figures are reliable enough for decisions. They complement outcome measures.

• 10. Planned workload and available capacity. Compare planned and available hours by skill, allowing for absences and recurring tasks. An overall average can conceal an overloaded role.
• 11. Cases with complete required information. Share of cases with the data needed for the next stage. Limit the check to fields that genuinely matter.
• 12. Dashboard data age. Time since each source was last updated. Flag a delayed source before interpreting its chart.

Turn the review into decisions

Choose the indicators that match your current problems. When one changes, check the context, decide on an action and name an owner. A useful threshold depends on your baseline, commitments and actual capacity; no universal thresholds are proposed here.

Revisit the selection when priorities change. A dashboard full of indicators that lead to no decisions becomes a report to read rather than a management tool.