Work with 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.

We provide you with a powerful yet an easy way to use to track real time data over your own or your teams' progress on strategy execution, these're the Dashboards. We believe that if we allow you to self serve data to understand how your plans are tracking, you'll be more engaged, which will lead to alignment and scalability.

Click Dashboards from the left navigation menu. Click Create a dashboard. You can do this action from the Dashboards page as well by clicking New Dashboard at the top-right. Give the dashboard a title and click Save.

In case of Essentials or Enterprise+ tiers, you'll have the option to set access permissions for the dashboard at the time of its creation itself. See Dashboard Permissions to know about access control and privacy settings.

Once you’ve created your dashboard, you’ll have to configure the widgets.Widgets

You can add a widget by clicking the Add Widget in the top right corner, or by clicking Configure Widget in any of the open boxes. Though the date picker shows a default value, you can always choose the range from the list. If you wish to visualize the data for particular date, you can customize by clicking on that date, or if its a range of your choice, then click the specific start and due dates from the date picker.

You'll see the widget display data only if the data source (plan, focus area, team, objective, etc.) has updates made within this time range that you select.

The Widget library, at this point consists of some basic, but very helpful widgets. These're explained in detail in the other articles in this section.

How to interpret data from the dashboard?

Hover the mouse over the graphs to view the progress over time. In case of multiple objectives or measures, these would show how different values have progressed over time in different colors. The dotted lines represent the expected progress in most cases. Click the day range in the bottom-left of the widget to look at the historical data (You can see the day ranges only when you hover the mouse over the charts). And if you need to look at historical trend, you need to update the progress via goal-hub, and then come back here to reflect it in the widget-view.

Expand the Date filter at the top-right to select the date-range for which you need to monitor and present the data. You can choose a specific Time horizon or specific dates from the Custom tab to adjust the date settings at the dashboard level to look at the relevant visuals in each widget. Or, you can quickly select one of those prefilled time periods from the Relative tab that'll adjust the date settings automatically relative to today's date. For example, if you choose last 30 days, the axes in the widgets will automatically adjust to the last 30 days from today's date and display the visuals. This will display the data for this date range only for that moment, and once you move out of this space, and come back, it would automatically reflect the data for the date ranges we configured in the widgets. Please note that this will not have impact on those widgets that do not rely on a date range, example, widgets like "Compare Measure by Owners", "Health of a Plan", etc.

As and when we make progress, the related widgets automatically gets updated. You can drag and resize the widgets to look around for the data that you wish to see. There are options to zoom in and out as well. You can delete a widget by clicking the three dots on the top-right corner of it, and clicking Delete. Once confirming the deletion, the widget will be removed from the dashboard.

Click the (comment) icon to open the Comments sidebar - leave a comment (use rich-text, align, apply styles), use "@" to tag someone/team in the workspace, and click Send. If you've enabled the notifications for "Someone mentions me" in your profile settings, then you'll receive a notification in-app/email/both. You can edit/delete these comments from the three dots.

FAQs

When to use dashboards vs reports?

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.

I have selected "last 7 days" in my widget, how does the data poll?

At any point in time, this widget will display the last 7 day data. It automatically polls the last 7 days data from the current data, unless reconfigured.

What happens if I delete the data configured in a widget?

This will automatically show the last polled data. Only if you delete the widget, it will be removed from the dashboard.

Can I add an iframe into a dashboard?

No, not at this point in time.

Can I export the dashboard or the widgets in the dashboard?

No. But you can add the same widgets in a report and export them individually to a CSV format. Create a report, and add a widget from the (Chart) icon, click the three dots against the chart, and click Export to CSV.

Or, you can export them as a PDF at the report level.

How to edit the name of a widget that is configured?

Click the three dots on the upper-right corner of the widget, and click Edit. You can edit the name of the widget, change the data source or the date range here.

Can I change the owner to someone else?

Yes, click the three dots against the dashboard name, and click Settings. You'll be able to change the owner from here if you're an Admin or have edit permissions. Remember that you can only add a person who's already there in the workspace. Also, you cannot add a Viewer as owner.

Why don't I see any data in my widget?

There might be two possibilities:

• If the objective/measure/project/action does not fall under the time range that you've selected during the widget set-up.

• If you haven't made any progress on that entity (objective/measure/project/action) in the chosen time range, then you'll not see any data.

However, if its within the time range, and you've updated the progress, but still do not see any data, then please contact us.

Can I build my own widget?

Yes, click on Custom Chart, and you can choose the type of chart, and the data to wish to display. See Build Custom Charts for details.

Can I restrict access to my dashboard?

Yes, see Dashboard Permissions for details.