What is a Performance Dashboard?

Definition the Performance Dashboard

A performance dashboard is not a tool for testing

Still too often, the key indicator is being used as a business report. Although it is supposed to make business monitoring placed under a person in charge's authority easier, it is more often used to check subordinates.
"How come you didn't reach this goal? How can you explain it?".
Used this way, it only triggers the following judgment:
Congratulation or Blame.
Congratulation: "You have reached your goals? That's great! We will set the bar higher next time!"
Reprimand and making guilty: "You have failed again! Because of you the entire department is in the sights of the Management!"
"A Performance dashboard is an instrument of progress, to assist in improving performance in all its forms." (nodesway.com)

A performance dashboard is not a tool to run a meeting

It is also very common to pay more attention to the presentation's pure design than to its pertinence. So the quality of displayed facts is relegated to the background. This kind of use allows not to lose face during meetings but remains totally useless for decisions making.

It is not either a tool to make a statement of fact

Dashboards aren't a recent creation. Used since the beginning of the 20th century, dashboards allowed then to make afterwards statements of facts about the pertinence of choices that had been made. The context being steady and the variations of the magnitude being small, it was always time to reorientate the strategy and refine the plans.

The major words in management were SCHEDULE - PLAN - CHECK and the statement of fact perfectly came within this pattern. Unfortunately, although the context has changed a great deal, using dashboard as a tool to make a statement of fact is still going on. Indeed most dashboards in use nowadays are limited to comparison making between what has been scheduled and what has been done. They don't allow to react when it is still time to correct.

In our world of uncertainty and continuous change, it is not possible anymore to rely on this old fashioned principle. This conception needs to be reformed, and a real management support tool has to be specified.

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