Five questions to ask before you build another dashboard

I have lost count of the number of school dashboards I have seen demoed by a vendor and then abandoned by Term 3. The reasons are nearly always the same. The dashboards answered questions nobody had actually asked.

These are the five questions I now ask, in order, before agreeing to build any dashboard.

The first one. What decision is this dashboard going to change? Not "what data will it show". What action will be taken differently because of it. If the honest answer is "I'll just be more informed", the dashboard usually gets opened twice and then forgotten. The dashboards that survive are the ones tied to a specific decision rhythm: the weekly leadership meeting, the fortnightly attendance review, the end-of-month compliance check.

The second one. Who will look at it, and how often? Not "leadership". A specific person, a specific cadence. If the answer is "anyone in the leadership team, whenever they want", the dashboard is for nobody. If the answer is "the deputy principal on Monday mornings before the briefing", the dashboard has a chance.

The third one. What are they currently doing instead, and why is it not working? This is the question that surfaces the real problem. Sometimes there is already a manual report that works fine, in which case automating it is just a small efficiency. Sometimes the manual report has been slowly producing the wrong number for two years, and the dashboard is an opportunity to fix the underlying data, not just visualise it.

The fourth one. What is the worst thing that could happen if the data on this dashboard is wrong by 5%? Most school dashboards do not need to be exact. Attendance trends, broad workload distribution, on-time submission rates: a 5% error usually doesn't change the decision being made. But if the answer to this question is "we would make a wrong staffing call worth tens of thousands of dollars", the data validation conversation has to happen before the dashboard exists, not after.

The fifth one. What will we stop doing once this dashboard exists? This is the hardest one to answer honestly. The healthiest answer is "we will stop producing the manual report that it replaces". The unhealthy answer is "we'll keep doing the manual report as well, just to be safe". Schools that fall into the second pattern end up with more work, not less, because the dashboard becomes another thing to maintain rather than a replacement for something else.

If a dashboard cannot survive these five questions, it almost certainly will not survive a busy term. Better to discover that on a planning page than after six weeks of build work.