Quality Dashboard for Construction Projects: what’s in it?

Directors love them.

Project Managers love them.

Clients love them.

Everybody loves fancy Dashboards with statistics and charts nowadays!

Everybody loves KPIs!

Or are they?

To be fair, Dashboards provide a simple way of representing useful Data and information to the decision-makers and thus they should be simple, concise and provide only the data that really matter.

As a rule of thumb: if someone needs to spend more than 20 seconds to understand the information on a Dashboard, then the game is lost…

The ideal scenario for the future, would be such a Dashboard to be produced automatically by using appropriate software on site (looking at you PowerBi).

But unfortunately, we are still depending a lot on manual spreadsheets and in my opinion this will not change anytime soon…(I dare to say not earlier than in 10 years at least).

There is hope though!

But what data and information need to be in a Quality Dashboard of a Construction Project?

Every Construction Project and Client is unique and different. The requirements and the data are different.

However, there are some certain information that should be in every Quality Dashboard.

Information like NCRs progress and trends, results from Audits, major issues the last month, cost of NCRs and things like that should definitely be there in my opinion.

Our only purpose as Quality Professionals should be the continuous improvement of what we are doing and the only way to achieve this is by highlighting and then obviously avoiding the mistakes of the past.  So, this information is essential.

I must say though that I am not a big fan of reporting.

The main reason is that I am a true believer in live reporting and data collection.

What I mean by this is that if you had all the data from the site (or off of it) properly recorded on a platform/software then producing a Dashboard should be a matter of a click. We really shouldn’t spend man-hours producing manually pretty dashboards that look nice on a wall.

It’s all about data collection and presentation at the end of the day.