Dashboard example: workforce planning

Problem to solve

As a human resources manager, I need to enter the salary raise numbers for multiple regions for which I am responsible.

As a domain best practice, my driver-based model helps me to enter raise guidelines, which will then change at the employee level.

Usability issue addressed: I have ten regions, eight departments in each, with a total of 10,000+ employees. I need to align my bottom-up plan to the down target I received earlier.

I need to quickly identify which region is above/behind target and address the variance. My driver-based raise modeling is fairly advanced, and I need to see the business rules. I need to quickly see how it impacts the employee level.

Call to action

• Step 1: Spot which region I need to address. 
• Step 2: Drill into the variances by department
  • Steps 1 & 2 are analytics steps: "As an end user, I focus first on where the biggest issues are." This is a good usability practice that helps users.
• Step 3: Adjusting the guidelines (drivers)
  • There are not excessive instructions on how to build and use guidelines, which would have cluttered the dashboard. Instead, Anaplan added a "view guideline instruction" button. This button should open a dashboard dedicated to detailed instructions or link to a video that explains how guideline works.
    

Impact analysis

• The chart above the grid will adjust as guidelines are edited. That is a good practice for impact analysis— no scrolling or clicking needed to view how the changes will impact the plan.
• Step 4: Review a summary of the variance after changes are made. Putting steps 1–4 close to each other is a usable way of indicating to a user that he/she needs to iterate through these four steps to achieve their objective, which is to have every region and every department be within the top down target.
• Step 5: A detailed impact analysis, which is placed directly below steps 3 and 4. This allows end users to drill into the employee-level details and view the granular impact of the raise guidelines.

Notice the best practices in step 5. The customer will likely ask to see 20 to 25 employee KPIs across all employees and will be tempted to display these as one large grid. This can quickly lead to an unusable grid made of thousands of rows (employees) across 25 columns.

Instead, we have narrowed the KPI list to only ten that display without left-right scrolling.

Criteria to elect these ten: be able to have a chart that compares employees by these KPIs.

The remaining KPIs are displayed as an info grid, which only displays values for the selected employee. Things like region, zip codes, and dates are removed from the grid as they do not need to be compared side-by-side with other KPIs or between employees.