Get Insight on your Progress

The plan is set, the objectives are defined, and to succeed with the execution of your strategy, you will need effective and powerful ways to monitor and understand progress.

We, at Cascade, help you discover insights with our dashboards and reports that can accelerate your strategy to the next level. This allows you to make confident, informed decisions and build compelling narratives in your meetings with beautifully visualized data available at your fingertips.

While there are some similarities between reports and dashboards, they can each be better suited for specific situations. Here is a quick reference that you can use to decide whether or not you should use a dashboard or report.

• Use a report if you are wanting to communicate something. This can be for a board meeting, vendor update, or business analysis!
• Use a dashboard if you are wanting to monitor something. This can be useful for team meetings or for leadership to keep an eye on certain data sets!

Dashboards

Dashboards leverage mostly visual elements to enable a user to monitor key sets of data or metrics to allow them to maintain observability around what is important and relevant to them. They're excellent to use for weekly meetings or for leaders to monitor key areas of the strategy, and consist of chart widgets that are real time data, historically allowing users to look back and understand what has happened in time periods, using data sources that are available. See Work with Dashboards and Build Custom Charts to learn about creating widgets and custom charts within your dashboards. Some of the widgets that're available in Cascade are:

• "Health of your Plan" widget
• "Compare Multiple Measures" widget
• "Compare Multiple Objectives" widget
• "Single Measure Performance" widget
• "Compare Measures with Different Units" widget
• "Compare Multiple Measures by Owners" widget
• "Performance of Measures by Time Range" widget
• "Current State of Measure" widget
• "Compare Measures by Time Range - Line over Bar" widget
• "Notes" widget
• "Risk Distribution Scatter Plot" widget
• Custom Charts Widget: Bar Charts
• Custom Charts Widget: Line Charts
• Custom Charts Widget: Double Y-axis Line Charts
• Custom Charts: Project Analytics

Reports

Reports allows you to select a set of data based on the context and narrative that you're trying to communicate, and streamline this data in a format that is easily shareable - enabling you to effectively and efficiently communicate the said data. This helps generate engagement reports for each strategic plan to unlock insights about who is most involved with strategy, helping you make sure everyone is aligned and working together.

Three key use cases for reports are:

• Business analysis (inward) around a certain set of initiatives (a team's, a project's, a departments) to assess opportunities, challenges, and risks;
• Strategy reports (upward) to communicate upward to include strategic updates, timelines, resources, and required support/resources;
• Performance reports (outward) around individuals, teams, or projects to communicate downward/outward - for partners, customers, vendors, suppliers, other teams.

Other advanced use cases for reports are board meetings, strategic evaluations/analyses to set goals, and more.

 See Generate Reports to learn how to create reports! The reports that you can build in Cascade are:

• "Objectives table" for reporting on Objectives
• "Team table" for reporting on Teams
• "Initiatives table" for reporting on Individuals' performance
• "Measures table" for reporting on Measures

FAQs

Does Cascade help with performance management?

Yes! When you say performance management, its all about

• Goal setting
• Measurable KPIs
• Targets and deadlines
• Regular updates

Now, all these are already tracked in your goals in the plans that're built. You can just build an "Initiatives table" to assess the performance of an individual or "Team table" to assess the performance of a team. Or, you can build an "Objectives table" and apply filters or group the data by team or owners, and include columns like

• Progress
• Due date
• Last update
• Health

This'll give a picture of performance as such. In addition, you can build charts like "Compare Multiple Measures by Owners" widget to track how different owners are performing against their measures. Or, you can build custom charts in dashboards with data source as Team or Owners, and visualize their progress and performance.

Use the "Notes" widget in dashboard or "Notes" in reports to provide context and review comments.