Time and Activity: Dashboards
Objective. Read the roll-up dashboard and restate any headline figure with its denominator and scope attached, then name the drill that would confirm it.
The dashboard is the summary layer: headline attendance, available-hours, utilisation and exception counts rolled up across teams and a period. It answers 'what is the overall shape' - and is the single easiest screen to misread.
See it in the demo
What this screen answers
A manager or exec opens this for the one-glance picture: across the selected scope and period, what does attendance, available time, utilisation and exception volume look like? It is the entry point for a review meeting - the place you start a conversation, not the place you end one.
The task
Set the scope and the period deliberately before reading anything - a dashboard with an unstated scope is the root of most bad readings. Then treat each headline tile as a question, not a conclusion: for the one figure that matters to the conversation, open the underlying team or day view to see the distribution behind the average.
How to read it
Two disciplines. First, every headline carries a denominator and a scope - a utilisation number is productive activity over available hours for these teams over this period; say that out loud. Second, an average hides its spread. A healthy org-level utilisation can sit on top of one overloaded team and one idle one. The misread is quoting a single rolled-up percentage as if it described every team equally.
Honest limits
A dashboard summarises; it does not explain and it does not prove output. A number here is only as sound as the data coverage behind it - teams or people with no signal can distort an average without any flag on this screen. Confirm the definitions and the capture coverage with product before a figure becomes a customer commitment, and never read utilisation here as business productivity.
Interpretation check
A single rolled-up figure is an average over a chosen scope and period, with its own denominator - not a fact true of every team inside it. Always state scope + denominator, and drill to the distribution before quoting it.
In the field
In a QBR, resist quoting an org-level utilisation lift; show the dashboard to frame the conversation, then drill to the team distribution so the customer sees where attention is actually needed.
Practical task
On the demo dashboard, pick one headline tile and write it out fully: figure + denominator + scope + period, plus the one drill-down you would open to check it is not hiding an outlier team.
Self-check
Why is the dashboard the easiest screen to misread?
It presents averages without their spread. A healthy headline can hide an overloaded team and an idle one; quoting the average as if it applied to everyone is the classic error.
A customer points at an 80% utilisation tile. What two things do you attach before responding?
The denominator (productive activity over available hours, not scheduled hours) and the scope (which teams, which period). Then drill to the per-team distribution.
What can silently distort a dashboard average with no visible flag?
Incomplete data coverage - people or teams with no agent/activity signal. Confirm capture coverage before trusting a roll-up.
Verified vs demo. Screen is live in the demo at /#/dashboards; exact controls and figures are SME-validation-pending.