Executive dashboard that disagrees with the board
A PMO supports eight project boards with 1,200 active items and about 4,000 subitems. The executive dashboard has a Numbers widget for active projects, a Chart by status, a Battery widget for budget consumed, and a Timeline. The PMO director reports 1,200 active projects, but the Numbers widget shows 1,150; the status chart shows 300 items in Done while the board’s Done group has 420; the budget Battery shows 62% consumed while Finance’s spreadsheet says 71%. The dashboard takes 18 seconds to load. Some boards use a date column called Due date; others use Deadline; one team archives completed items weekly, another never archives. Two boards are connected to a CRM board, and the budget mirror column is blank on 18% of items. The PMO needs a monthly executive pack that reconciles to board counts within 2%.
1. Explain the likely reasons the dashboard counts differ from the board counts, and specify checks you would run.
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The counts differ because the board and the dashboard are not querying the same population. A board count includes active items in all groups; the dashboard may exclude archived items, apply a filter, use a different source board, or count only items with a non-empty value in a column. The Done discrepancy is a classic status-label and archive issue: 420 items may sit in the Done group, but only 300 have the Done status, or 120 were archived and excluded. The budget gap can come from a blank mirror on 18% of items, a different budget column, or Finance including committed spend. I would run four checks: compare the widget filter to the board filter, check archived items, check whether the widget counts items or subitems, and test with a viewer who has the same permissions as the director. I would also reconcile the budget mirror to the Finance source before blaming the dashboard.
2. Recommend whether to fix the dashboard or change the data model, and outline a reconciliation approach that meets the 2% tolerance.
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Fix the data model first, then the dashboard. Standardize one Due date column and one budget column across all eight boards; stop using a mirror as the budget system of record unless the source is complete. Publish an archive rule so completed items move to an archive after a fixed period, and use the same status labels for the executive metrics. For the 2% tolerance, build a monthly reconciliation: export the board counts by status and group, apply the same filters as the dashboard, and compare to the widget numbers. A small summary board connected to the project boards can hold one row per project with mirrored status, due date, and budget; the dashboard then queries one source instead of eight. That gives a stable count and makes blank mirrors visible as data-quality exceptions. I would not promise 2% until the blank-mirror rate is below 2% and the archive rule is enforced.
3. What dashboard design changes would improve load time and executive readability without losing the required metrics?
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Reduce the number of moving parts. Build the executive dashboard on the summary board, not on eight project boards plus a CRM connection; fewer sources and fewer connected columns shorten load time. Replace the Timeline of 4,000 subitems with a Timeline or Gantt of projects only, and use a Numbers widget with a clear filter for active projects. Use one Chart for status and one Battery or Number widget for budget, with a target line, rather than several overlapping widgets. Apply a dashboard-level filter for the current fiscal period and archive old items on a schedule. For readability, put the reconciliation count and the as-of date on the dashboard so executives see what is included. If load time remains high, split the pack into an executive summary dashboard and a PMO detail dashboard; do not keep adding widgets to compensate for missing data standards.