I've seen months of effort poured into dashboards that nobody uses. Beautiful charts. Real time data. Colour coded everything. RAG statuses that update automatically. Drill downs into drill downs. The team glances at them in meetings, nods politely, and goes back to their spreadsheets. The problem is rarely the dashboard. It's what's being measured. The Activity Trap Most operational dashboards measure activity: Call volumes Average handling time Tasks completed Queue lengths

When I started analysing touch time data for a major UK insurer's claims operation, I thought I knew what I'd find. Inefficient processes. Slow systems. Undertrained staff. The usual suspects. However, I discovered we'd been looking at the problem entirely wrong. And that misunderstanding was costing the business thousands of hours annually. The Original Hypothesis (That Turned Out to Be Wrong) Like most operational excellence projects, we started with a simple question: "How