Technology blogger Robert Cringley wrote today about 80 percent solutions.

“80 percent solutions … are fast, increasingly reliable, and keep the end users in the loop from almost the beginning.”

This got me wondering: do 80% solutions now suffice nearly 100% of the time? And is this acceptable? Should we strive for more? Is the incremental improvement in the solution worth the additional amount of extra effort and resources required?

Let’s keep this in mind as we think about continues to be a hot topic this year: the performance dashboard.

What just popped into your head?

• Was it an online, web-based system?
• Is it a real-time system?
• Is the displayed information customized based on your identity or role within the organization?
• Do you imagine being able to filter for specific content dynamically?
• Do its elements drill down to help answer your questions?

Or are some or all of those things just the glitz, the shiny features that some marketers are telling some software developers the things that they think that you want - when all you really need is to use or develop a dashboard that helps to answer basic truths, like:

• Where are we at?
• What do our trends look like?
• What’s doing well?
• What needs my attention and requires my action?

Those are pretty universal questions that could be asked just about anywhere and still be meaningful.

A Dodge or a Ferrari?

If, for any number of reasons, you couldn’t have the souped-up sports car version with all the bells and whistles, and instead had to “settle” for the practical mini van equivalent, how would you deal with the compromises?

If you couldn’t access or produce an online dashboard, what other mechanism get the job done? If it the data wasn’t real-time, what other update frequency would be acceptable? How would you envision the dashboard if it wasn’t customized just for you specifically, and would it still be useful to you if it wasn’t? Can you imagine an acceptable work-around for not being able to filter data dynamically? Finally, if you couldn’t drill down to lower levels of detail for the answers you need, could you get that information relatively quickly from someone else in your organization in a support role?

OK, you’ve determined that you have a definite need, and you have a vision of your solution for summarizing your operation performance information needs. You’ve committed to proceeding with a dashboard project.

Will you pick up the phone and call your favorite software vendor and order a generic package that might work for you? Will you free up an entire IT team and allocate the budget for the dashboard project?

Oh, and there’s one other little tidbit: outside pressures dictate that you need to have this working and published, in one way or another, by the end of next week. No joke.

No I haven’t lost my mind.

You can accomplish this with a mere four easy steps:

1) Go visit ExcelUser.com and buy Charley Kyd’s ebook “Dashboard Reporting with Excel“. You’ll learn the requirements of how you can build fully functional, easy to update and maintain dashboard style reports. Buy it on Friday, read it over the weekend and you’ll be good to go for Monday.

2) Capitalize on your existing systems with Monarch. You’re already doing this, and you have many existing models, so you’re a step ahead. You may find that you need to modify your models a bit to allow for the sorts of data structures and data access mechanics that Charley teaches. You also might need to acquire some more data to generate the trend information that you want in your end product. Let’s allocate a day and a half for this, though you may not need that long.

3) Excel’s charts can be pretty good when done well, but your time is tight, and there’s a better tool for dashboard charts anyway: MicroCharts from BonaVistaSystems. Give yourself a couple of hours to install and learn how to use them. Again, you likely won’t need that long.

4) It’s now Wednesday morning, and it’s time put together what you’ve learned. You’ve got three full days to build your first prototype. You can do it. All by yourself, no less! I know that you can do this.

I built my first functional dashboard prototype in just over a day. That was almost two years ago and I’ve been using it once a month, every month, ever since - without any changes. Maybe you’ll get as lucky as I’ve been.

A word about the MicroCharts product. I mentioned it here briefly once before. I intend to prepare a full (or at least better) review for you, but until then, here’s the executive summary:

• it works,
• it’s easy to learn,
• it’s fast,
• the output looks great, and
• it works. Yes, that’s worth repeating.

If your dashboard was really well defined at the outset, and you’ve done all you can to accomplish its goals, you’ve completed your project in less than a week.

If you need to make adjustments, you’ll find that you now have the skills to do that easily and quickly. What you initially thought was a pretty lofty goal that had you quite anxious, you now actually find to be rewarding and maybe even outright fun.

Just Do It

OK, maybe I’m the only one who finds it fun. But I’m betting that isn’t the case. You’ll enjoy this; I know it. Just try. What’s it going to cost you for the project? A little for the ebook, a little for the special chart software, and a week’s worth of your time. Sounds like a pretty minor investment to me for a tool that your organization is going to be able to use for a long time to come.

Once you get the basic steps and functionality down pat, you’ll likely find that you’re repeating the same steps each time you update your dashboard. That’s when you can take it to the next level, and automate the process - an absolutely key part to performing the data update work in record time.

By the way, have you signed up for the FeedBurner services that sends you ExcelWithMonarch.com site updates via email yet? That’s the only way to receive my free Monarch programming tool that you can use to help make automating your dashboard project even easier.

Are We There Yet?

So maybe we didn’t accomplish 100% of your dream dashboard project. Did we hit 80% of it? And will that suffice? Maybe, just maybe, good enough is all you really needed in the first place. It might even be all you ever need.

What I do know for sure is that within a week you can be 100% farther along in a dashboard project than you were the week before. All you have to do is excel with Monarch.