Business Intelligence Dashboards and Data Visualization

Nowadays amount of data which companies are producing on a daily basis is overwhelming. Data used wisely provides information for making strategic decisions and run better businesses. Datas provide insights which helps answering business questions: what actions should be taken, what problems should be solved and how. More and more companies becomes data-driven organizations and decides of implementation of reports and dashboards which visually shows company performance at one glance.

Visual representation of data helps to understand data quickly and demonstrate important relationships between two or more data sources, how one data point correlates to another. Automation of dashboards saves a lot of time and help companies to run business on a daily basis. Dashboards can have different purposes like help to show trends, pain points or help operational employees in a daily tasks.

Ewelina Pietryga, Business Intelligence Expert

Awesome experience! SoftwareSupp Freelancer did everything we were looking to do. Now we have a complex Business Intelligence Dashboard visualizing all of our data in one place.

Matt Thomes, General Manager at Snap Construction

Companies are looking after experts in area of business intelligence outside of their own organization because outsourcing have a lot of positive aspects like access to high-class experts experienced in particular area/tool and in relatively quick timeframe projects are delivered. Experts are implementing solutions according to the best practices they learned through experience by participating in many projects in different organizations. Subject matter experts who worked in many organizations look at the problems/projects in bigger perspective than experts who work in one organization. 

Delivering business intelligence solutions like automated dashboards and reports is easy at first sight but you should ask yourself, are you doing it right? We should stress out that presenting data properly is as important as ever because it can give not correct message still using the same dataset as dashboards well-designed should convey information. As we start with creation of the dashboard we check first if data is easy accessible and what size of company its. Big companies can already have big data and ready data warehouses prepared and to be used but on the other hand we have small size businesses where data warehouses are not needed and dashboards can already access the data sources directly and its has no impact for end-users in terms dashboard responsiveness.

Business intelligence and data visualization project

Snap Construction company uses Pipedrive CRM to look after project deals and now they want to see performance of deals, average job size, close ratio by sales people, deal source and category in one view in the online dashboard. Pipedrive offers dashboards but the possibility is limited. Company decides to outsource that because of a lack of specialists in their own company.

Project scope:

1. Understand client requirements and preference of BI tool.
2. Matching client needs with available tools and integrations.
3. Creating first version of the dashboard and sharing with client.
4. Feedback and adjusting the dashboard.
5. Closing the project.

Skills used: technical knowledge of BI tools on the market which will suit customer needs, I do not want to offer BI tool where a maintenance and license is high in terms of costs. In this case there was no dashboard online used and no preference so therefore I suggested Google Data Studio because: no cost, ease of implementation, online BI tool, ease of integration with Pipedrive through 3rd party connectors.

Business knowledge: understand the topic of the dashboard.

Project's challenges

I am treating projects as unique as each client is different and always checking requirements to understand if we are on the same page before starting with the project. Many clients use different terminology and sometimes metrics should be adjusted per their requirements to meet their needs. It's important that me and client speak the same language in terms of if we understand each other. During a call it was found out that some exclusions should be considered as how they mark unqualified deals, it was not defined in the project scope. My mission is not only to deliver the dashboard but also leave a client happy so he will be returning customer and keep him satisfied. 

For data integration I have used Dataddo which will allow us automatically pipe data from Pipedrive to Google Data Studio per schedule. 

Connecting to created flow in Google Data Studio

Created a dashboard in Google Data Studio - first version:

Challenges:

• Dataset issue - working with Dataddo to add custom field: Job Type from Deals
• Duplicated deals
• Finalizing pricing with them (aiming to pay 35$/pm). Dataddo charges 35$/pm per source and in this case there are 2: Deals and Stages 
• Asked to add dataset since 2017 even though Dataddo offers 1 year of data (because of small dataset)
  

Suggestion for inexperienced:

• Understand clients needs very well
• Always ask questions to customer if you unsure, we want to satisfy the clients
• Show progress to client even the dashboard is not finished, not wait until the end to hear that its not what he was looking for because you and client will be disappointed

Client will save money because project was delivered in relative short timeline according to the requirements.

The best options was shared and proposed so client will save money.

Dashboard should show performance of deals and show at which stage company is losing the deals and see how effective they are so it should show the real problem and maybe the strategy how they operate should be changed or maybe some improvements in the process added.