Fitbit Company - Development of the Dashboard - Case Study Example

FITBIT DASHBOARD PROJECT REPORT By (Name) Name of Class (Course) Professor (Tutor) Name of Institution (University) City and State The Date Introduction The success and growth of any organization is greatly influenced by competitive internal processes. The amount of data required in an organization keeps increasing as the organization grows (Lora & Remillard, 2010). For an ever growing company like Fitbit, it can be extremely tedious to collect and analyze its large quantities of data. Not having the required data at the right time can lead to delays in decision making related to that specific data. The main stakeholders of the Fitbit Company, i.e. the senior managers and the board receive a lot of monthly reports that summarize performance data for every single area of execution. Coming up with a dashboard would help the managers and the board to easily visualize the appropriate data about the company; this would be summarized into one incorporated view (Snell, 2014). The reason why a dashboard would be most relevant is that each stakeholder could customize it to only view the information most relevant to them. Creating a dashboard needs a good amount of research in order to create layout designs, compile data sources and note the user requirements and this is a long process that would take a good amount of time. Fitbit is a company that produces health monitoring products which include wireless-enabled wearable technology and activity trackers that measure personal fitness metrics like heart rate, quality of sleep, and number of steps walked (Fitbit, 2017). This project report focuses on the creation process of a dashboard for this company for the senior manager to present to the board of the organization and the relevance of this dashboard. Audience This project primarily focuses on the dashboard vision of the board of the Fitbit Company. The idea however is that after it is created, it can be applied to other levels of management and other execution areas such as project and program managers. The different views would be customizable according to the status of the different stakeholders and updated in real time. The board make the final decisions of the direction of the company and these are based on the information given to them by the senior managers. As such, the dashboard would help both these senior managers on deciding what recommendations to present and the board on deciding whether to back them up or not. The senior manager wants to come up with a dashboard using SharePoint for the daily use if the board. The data has to be transformed from its initial source to a summarized visual format which can be easily understood by other stakeholders. This dashboard aims to reduce the time taken for these major company stakeholders to go through reports for relevant information and interpret the data found in them. The senior most managers and stakeholders are the intended users of the dashboard but it would be accessible to the other workforce when need be. Different departments of the company will make use of the dashboard to analyze data within the process of making decisions. The different departments of the company would make use of the dashboard differently according to their particular needs (Snell, 2014). These different uses would either result to success or failure. The senior managers and the board would use the dashboard to make the most vital decisions of the company, the suppliers would use it to manage inventory, logistics, distribution and monitoring the rate of return (Liang & Miranda, 2011). The sales and marketing department will use the dashboard to collect information on pipeline, prices and unit orders and forecast sales. The Information Technology department would use the dashboard to calculate the time and cost of any project, manage resources and schedule the company’s processes. Benefits A dashboard would benefit the Fitbit Company through the creation of insight with the ability to judge performances better and the ability to predict possible outcomes. Coming up with an efficient dashboard would transition a company from measuring performance to being able to manage it (McKinney, Hess & Whitecar, 2012). This tool is supposed to steer business procedures and nurture the perfect environment for best performance and eventually giving the company the ability to accurately measure, manage and monitor business performance. The dashboard would give the organization the ability to communicate its strategy to the different departments. Information such as targets and goals of the company are broadcasted to the departments where thresholds are established. Visibility within the company will significantly increase by communicating the strategy. This increase in visibility in turn gives insight into individual performance of the employees. If the key performance indicators and performance metrics start to decline, the company can analyze the metrics to comprehend the reason for the decline (McKinney, Hess & Whitecar, 2012). Increased visibility of data increases workers responsibilities as each is held responsible for the success of the organization. Another benefit of the dashboard is that it would help in identifying the opportunities and threats faced by the business (Liang & Miranda, 2011). By monitoring and storing the activities previously undertaken by the company, the stakeholders can realize the opportunities they have not explored yet and these may include the search for new markets to increase sales. By summarizing the capabilities of the Fitbit products, the stakeholders can note rooms for enhancement for use with more personal metrics that have not been achieved before (Liang & Miranda, 2011). The dashboard would also help the company realize its chances to get revenue from partnerships with new boards and companies. Apart from realizing opportunities for the company, this dashboard would also help the company realize its threats. Threats like competitor activities that may lead to the reduction of sales could be monitored using the dashboard. The dashboard can also help in monitoring the ever changing technology and thus the company products can remain up to date. By monitoring changes in business taxes, the company is able to adjust its tax ratios in order to avoid losses as a result of taxes (Lora & Remillard, 2010). Implementation of a dashboard would also help in reducing time wastage since the users spend a lot of time looking through many systems to see and edit reports. Some have to make use of IT staff to do these tasks for them. An effective dashboard would show the up to date results for the reports and thus save a lot of time and resources. If these actions are accurately performed, the company is able to develop a work environment that gives better insight which is needed for the best possible performance of the organization. The ability of an organization to collect information and realize performance benchmarks is vital in its successful operation. The organizations are able to ensure the maximum utilization of resources, departmental goals are on target and jobs are done correctly (Few, 2006). If dashboards are put in place in each department with measures that extend through the entire organization, there must be a coordination in efforts to determine the important data based on performance keeping the overall goals of the dashboards in mind. This ensures the accurate information is produced in order to give the achieved result. If the Fitbit Company changes from measuring performance to managing it, it can easily avoid any future problems. Data A SharePoint dashboard is a system that is based online which allows users to share reports, tasks, contacts, organization calendars, documents and other types of information. It is a virtual workspace where individuals from different departments can upload and edit documents while it keeps records of every past version of the document and those that have edited the last version and the dates of the modifications (Few, 2006). There are other tools such as tasks and the organizational calendar that allows the different users in the different departments in the company to keep track of important meetings and progress of projects. Different abilities of access are given to users depending on their levels and roles in the Company. The Fitbit dashboard uses various types of data from different sources then puts them together into one display. The different data is drawn from sources like SQL Server, Excel, Jira, Oracle, Company websites and others. These are mostly data management tools that are used to record business information (Snell, 2014). Both internal and external data is included in the dashboard since they are both relevant to the overall decision making processes and eventually the performance of the organization. Internal data gives the ability to manage operations and comprehend mistakes and potential problems. External data similarly helps in the decision making processes with regard to suppliers and business threats and finding solutions to them. Examples of information that is included in the dashboard include: financial reports, graphs and tables of monthly summaries and trends over certain periods (Snell, 2014). Challenges There are many different ways to create a dashboard; the goal of every dashboard however, is to make it as efficient as possible. Coming up with an effective dashboard where users are able to easily comprehend the data presented in the dashboard is a complex task. A number of challenges were encountered in the creation process for the Fitbit Dashboard. The main problems faced were during data collection where if false data is presented, the whole dashboard will be ineffective. Another problem comes with designing the visual component for easy and quick analysis by the users; coming up with eye catching visuals for easy analysis is not an easy task. Developing metrics and KPIs also posed as a challenge since a single measure can be perceived in many different ways and as such the accurate metrics should be displayed in the most productive manner (Halonen, 2016). The last challenge posed was the post deployment strategy; there has to be a plan of action to be followed by the company based on the overall required outcomes. Methodology The goal of the project was to come up with a dashboard that would help the senior managers and the board of the Fitbit Company in making decisions and monitoring the performance of the company. The dashboard will also be available for the employees with different levels of accessibility. The dashboard will summarize the company’s performance, budgets, and projects and indicate categories like recruitments and training. The first approach was identifying the senior manager’s vision of the dashboard, understanding where the data is stored in the company systems and deciding the amount of data to be displayed most effectively. These goals were developed through the business intelligence lifecycle where: First was the project initiation and analysis where there the needs of the end users and the information they preferred to be displayed and in what way to be displayed were determined. The second stage was the planning and designing stage where the generation of a descriptive and structured pattern of the dashboard widgets took place. The third part was the development stage where widgets were developed on the Excel tool based on real data and the creation of the potential layout of the data (Enriquez & Rathore, 2013). The fourth stage was testing the dashboard which was time consuming since every aspect of the dashboard had to be checked for efficiency. The last stage was the implementation stage where the final tried and tested dashboard is transferred to the production environment for use by the stakeholders. The process of creating a dashboard is quite costly and time consuming since many people have to be put into consideration including the company suppliers. Almost every department in Fitbit took part in the creation process by giving information on what data to be displayed but the main system creation was done by the IT department. Conclusion The senior managers of the Fitbit Company showed interest in the development of the dashboard. This shows that the concept will significantly impact the supervision of performance is carried out across the organization. The company should have a plan of action with goals in mind before coming up with a dashboard design. The eventual aim of the dashboard should be to modify the operations of an organization by making minor adjustments, being ready for challenges and avoiding over corrections. The Fitbit Company can realize problems beforehand and make corrections before they become too big to handle. Reference List Enriquez, N. & Rathore, S. S., 2013. Discovering business intelligence using Micro Strategy: leverage the power of the Micro Strategy platform to design, develop, secure, and share business intelligence reports and dashboards. A business intelligence journal, 14(2), pp 342-388. Fitbit, 2017. About Fitbit. [Online]. Available at: https://www.fitbit.com/about. [Accessed 4 Apr 2017] Few, S., 2006. Information dashboard design: the effective visual communication of data. (3rd Edn). Beijing: O'Reilly. Halonen, H., 2016. A Proposal for Business Intelligence Solution Based on Systems Integration and Enhanced Reporting Functionality. (1st Edn). Helsinki: Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Liang, L. Y., & Miranda, R., 2011. Dashboards and scorecards: Executive Information Technology for the public sector. Government Finance Review, 17(6), 14-19. Lora, S. & Remillard, K., 2010. Development of a Performance Dashboard Concept for Senior IT Management at BNP Paribas. [Online]. Available at: https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-121910- 164956/unrestricted/BNP_Paribas_London_Final_MQP.pdf. [Accessed 4 Apr 2017]. McKinney, C., Hess, R. & Whitecar, M., 2012. Implementing business intelligence in your healthcare organization. (4th Edn). Melbourne: Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. Snell, R., 2014. Planning your dashboard project. [Online]. Available at: https://www.idashboards.com/wpcontent/themes/idashboards/pdf/whitepaper/Plannin g%20Your%20Dashboard%20Project.pdf. [Accessed 4 Apr 2017] Read More