Why Your Dashboard Isn't Fixing Anything

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

• Utilisation rates

  
  

These feel useful. They're easy to capture. They look impressive on a screen, but they tell you almost nothing about whether things are actually improving.

When I analysed thousands of tasks in a claims operation, I found that a large proportion of them added no value to the customer. Handlers were completing tasks, hitting targets, looking busy. The dashboard was green.

The operation was drowning in waste.

This isn't unique to insurance. I've seen the same pattern in logistics teams measuring parcels scanned rather than parcels delivered right first time. In contact centres tracking calls answered rather than problems actually resolved. In NHS trusts celebrating appointment utilisation while patients wait months for treatment that takes minutes.

The dashboard says things are working. The customer knows they're not.

Dashboards Show Symptoms, Not Causes

Here's the uncomfortable truth: a dashboard is a rearview mirror. It shows you what already happened. It doesn't tell you why.

You can see that calls are up. You can't see that customers are calling because they were given made-up dates that were then missed.

You can see that task completion is down. You can't see that people are spending a third of their time opening cases, finding nothing to do, and closing them again.

You can see that deliveries are delayed. You can't see that the warehouse is picking items in the wrong sequence because that's how the system was configured in 2011.

What Gets Measured Gets Managed (Into the Ground)

There's a reason teams optimise for the metrics on the dashboard, because that's what they're held accountable for.

If you measure call times, people will shorten calls - even if that creates more calls later.

If you measure tasks completed, people will complete tasks - even if those tasks achieve nothing.

If you measure utilisation, people will look busy

This plays out everywhere.

Hospitals measure bed occupancy, so patients get discharged before they're ready and bounce back within a week.

Retailers measure sales per square foot, so they cram in more stock and make the shop impossible to navigate.

Airlines measure on-time departure, so your flight leaves the gate on schedule and then sits on the tarmac for an hour.

The metric improves. The outcome doesn't.

The dashboard doesn't fix anything because the dashboard isn't designed to fix anything. It's designed to report. And reporting on the wrong things just makes you more efficient at doing the wrong work.

The Question Nobody Asks

In every operation I've worked with, there's been one question that unlocks more value than any dashboard:

"If the customer could see this task, would they pay for it?"

It's brutally simple. And it cuts through the noise.

That "check for updates" task that handlers do twelve times a day? The customer wouldn't pay for that.

That internal handoff that requires a form and three approvals? The customer wouldn't pay for that.

That rework because someone didn't capture the right information first time? Definitely not.

The question works in any sector.

Would a patient pay for the fifteen minutes a nurse spends filling in duplicate paperwork? Would a shopper pay for the stock being moved from the back to the shelf to the back again? Would a client pay for the four internal meetings it took to agree who would send them an email?

When you start asking this question, you stop measuring activity and start measuring value. And that's when things change.

What To Measure Instead

If I were advising on a dashboard today, I'd focus on a different set of questions:

• What percentage of work adds value to the customer? (Not tasks completed - tasks that mattered)

• How much demand is failure demand? (Customers calling because we failed them, not because they need something new)

• What's the gap between promise and delivery? (Did we do what we said we'd do, when we said we'd do it?)

• Where does work get stuck? (Not average time - actual bottlenecks)

• What are we doing that we could simply stop? (The uncomfortable one)

  
  

These are harder to measure. They require you to look at the system, not just the output. But they're the numbers that actually tell you what to fix.

The Dashboard Isn't The Problem

Let me be clear: dashboards aren't useless. Visibility matters. Data matters.

But a dashboard is a tool, not a solution.

If you're measuring the wrong things, a better dashboard just gives you a crisper view of the wrong things. You'll make faster decisions - about the wrong stuff.

The fix isn't better charts. It's better questions.

Start with: "What actually drives value for the customer?" Then measure that.

Everything else is noise with nice formatting.

MintOps partners with UK organisations to identify and eliminate operational waste. If you'd like to discuss how a diagnostic could uncover hidden opportunities in your operations, get in touch.