Team Dashboard

Below is a simple Java applet to demonstrate the principle of a 'Team Dashboard'. The original idea for this was presented in the Harvard Business Review (Meyer C., How the Right Measures Help Teams Excel, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1994. pp 95-103).

Although it is recognised that multifunctional teams can dramatically improve results, such teams require new performance measurements to fulfill their promise. The team dashboard provides a visual representation of process measures to monitor the tasks and activities throughout an organisation. These measures should be considered in addition to traditional control-oriented results measures.

The team dashboard should contain a number of measures, no more than 15, which monitor the performance of the team concerned. Ideally these should be chosen by the members of the team themselves. The measures should be capable of changing the team's behaviour when the measures indicate that the team is not meeting its goals.

The applet shown is a simple example of the idea. It shows only three gauges. The applet can read the data for each team from a file stored on the network and show the appropriate gauges and success levels for each team by simply altering the underlying data rather than the graphic. The data can be entered directly by the team manager or by an automated process.