Dashboard design and its relation to KPIs : A qualitative case study on a software company

Abstract: Monitoring key performance indicators (KPI) give practitioners immersive experience that is priceless when it comes to decision making and performance-enhancing in software companies. Used together with different tools that enable visualization of KPIs, users obtain big advantages that enable quick troubleshooting and detections of errors that could emerge in a product or a system. Many studies have been followed out in the field of data visualization using KPIs and digital dashboards. Still, the subject of KPIs providing valuable information to companies that are developing HR and payroll systems is relatively unexplored. The purpose of this thesis has been to investigate how essential KPIs should be visualized on a digital dashboard using a case company that focuses on developing HR and payroll systems. To investigate the phenomenon, five different interviews were conducted, and a digital dashboard was developed. The interviewees that participated in the empiric data collection were employees stationed in different teams with various authorities and experiences in the field of dashboards and KPIs. Previous works in the field of data visualization indicates that KPIs can be used and presented in various ways. When presenting KPIs on a dashboard, there are different factors that are of big influence of how successful the visualization gets. There are no complete templates on how KPIs should be visualized, however there are guidelines on how a dashboard could be shaped. Something that previous works and different interviewees in the present study agreed on was that a dashboard should consist of 4 to 8 KPIs. Too many KPIs can decrease the chance of obtaining the advantages that monitoring and visualizing KPIs on a digital dashboard can bring. Something that emerged from the study is the importance of first identify what to visualize and then implement how. Among the answers during the data collection, many interviewees found the number of users that were logged in on their products as something that would be useful to monitor. The reason for this was partly that the interviewees considered that by monitoring these numbers, it could increase the pride among the colleagues. The interviewees thought that it might boost morale among the employees if they visualized the many users of the products they are developing.