Reporting Suite for a Financial Services Client
For the past 2 years, I have been consulting for a US Top 10 bank and using Tableau to build interactive data visualizations that will provide insight on enterprise-wide projects for senior leadership in the organization.
Note that I have not used the name of my client, at their request. Instead of providing screenshots of actual dashboards that are being used at the bank, I produced these dashboards to give viewers a feel for my work without breaking my client's trust of confidentiality. All data is fake and any information that could be identifying to my client or their work has been scrubbed, including any branding and company-specific language.
Typically these dashboards are used to report on over 100 distinct initiatives, with additional supporting dashboards that give details on over 1,000 milestones that relate to each work effort. I only had the stamina to create ~20 mock Work Efforts, but hopefully that will be plenty to give you an idea of my design style and typical functionality I like to build into my executive reports.
To interact with the mock reports on a live site, please visit the following link:
But until Behance supports HTML embed code (*sigh*), I will walk you through these dashboards and a selection of their functionality with screenshots.
Executive Summary
This is the landing dashboard to provide executives with an at-a-glance view of the scheduled work, broken down by domains (or areas of work). Some questions that this dashboard can be used to answer:
- Which domains have the largest portions of work?
- What is the outlook for the current health of our projects?
- Which domains are mostly on track and which are falling behind?
- Are any domains completely closed out?
- How many projects are set to close out in the near future?
- Are we on track for the scheduled project closures?
As is common for many Tableau dashboards, this report contains a filter action. Rather than having a drop down at the top to filter the below graphs, a tree map is a more meaningful way to allow for the same functionality while also providing information of the work breakdown across domains.
Meaningful tool-tips also provide extra information and can serve as a way to provide the user with additional information without cluttering your graphic. I have found that writing tool-tips with the data incorporated into short phrases or sentences often facilitates greater understanding than using the default list of measure names and associated values auto-generated by Tableau.
An additional functionality worth noting here is the use of a user-controlled parameter. The drop down above the area graph will allow the user to zoom in on a smaller time period to get a more focused view of the number of work efforts scheduled for completion in the upcoming month(s).
Overall, this report has been well-received as a first stop to get a quick, at-a-glance view of the entire portfolio of Work Efforts. From here, users can access the following reports to dive deeper into the data.
Gantt Chart Scheduling
There is a single universal truth I have learned in my experience working with large businesses: everyone loves the humble Gantt chart. I have been asked to recreate this view for 3 separate portfolios of work within the bank because Gantt charts are so difficult to master in spreadsheet tools and so easy to execute in Tableau.
On this dashboard, filters allow users to easily slice and dice their data so they are only looking at the portion of work that they have ownership of or interest in. Again, a detailed tool-tip gives users extra information and saves the visual from an overwhelming amount of text. With the tool-tip, we only have to provide the most important detail (when the Work Effort ends) to the user as a label - all the remaining information is one hover away. Another critical feature is the reference line that aids users in making judgement on how far out (or how far behind) a given date is relative to today.
While this Gantt dashboard is not the flashiest from a Tableau functionality perspective, I find that it is repeatedly one of the most referenced views. Simple and clear, this visualization is a must for any businesses looking to gain insights on their portfolio of work.
Work Effort Details
Try as you might to fight it, users will inevitably end up asking for a tabular view of their data. Will all the back flips that Tableau can perform to make the information as clear and pointed as possible, at the end of the day people often need a no-frills report that gives them the underlying data straight-up. Rather than replicating a spreadsheet and sprucing things up with a few drop-down filters, consider giving your users a summary visual to interact with. Give some thought to the important way users may want to slice their data, then allow them to do so with actions instead of check-boxes. With a thoughtfully designed summary visual presented in conjunction with the base data, you may be able to draw their attention to successes or potential risks that would be impossible to deduce with a table alone.
