Team Performance Dashboard

What this tool does

CM8-299 runs a team-level performance dashboard, period by period, with accountability attached to every number. You record one row per measure, per team, per period: the actual, the target, which way is good, the person accountable, the countermeasure if it is red, and whether the team reviewed it. The tool works out direction-aware attainment, colours each measure, ranks the shortfalls, tracks movement between periods and prints a board pack you can take into a meeting.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so team names, absence figures, costs and shortfalls never leave the computer you are using.

The conversation, not the report

A team dashboard exists to make a short, regular conversation possible — daily at a board, or weekly at a desk. It is not a monthly report. A monthly report describes a period that has already finished, to people who were not there; a team dashboard exists so that the people who were there can decide what to do next, while the decision can still change the number.

That has one practical consequence, and it is the most important idea in this tool. A measure without a named owner and a written countermeasure is decoration. A number on a wall changes nothing by itself. What changes something is a person who knows the number is theirs, standing in front of colleagues, saying what they will do about it and by when. The arithmetic, the charts and the colours exist only to make that moment happen reliably and to record what was said. Strip out the owner and the countermeasure and you are left with a poster: pleasant, expensive to maintain, completely inert. That is why the tool refuses to save an off-target measure with nothing written against it — not pedantry, but a refusal to let the board become wallpaper on the day it matters.

Choosing measures a team can move

The commonest failure in team dashboards, by a distance, is giving a team a number it cannot move. A shop-floor team measured on group operating margin; a shift measured on a figure that only settles two months after the shift ended. In each case the team can do nothing but watch. What follows is predictable — the measure is reported, nobody has anything to say about it, the silence becomes normal, and the habit of silence spreads to the measures they could have moved.

Test each measure with three questions before it goes on the board. Can this team change it by next period through something they decide? Will they see the reading soon enough for the change to be visible? Would they recognise the number as a fair description of their own work? If any answer is no, the measure belongs on somebody else's board, and this team needs a measure further upstream that drives it.

Keep the set small. Five to eight measures is a working board; fifteen is a data feed nobody reads. The six categories — safety, quality, delivery, cost, people, improvement — are a prompt to cover the whole job, not a quota to fill. A team with three delivery measures and nothing on people is telling you what it has decided not to look at.

Direction-aware attainment

Measures point in different directions. Yield up is good; absence down is good. A naive actual-over-target ratio would reward the wrong movement half the time, so attainment follows the direction you set:

Either way, 100 means exactly on target and more is better. An absence rate of 4.2% against a 4.0% target scores 4.0 ÷ 4.2 × 100 = 95.2 — the same shortfall reads the same way whichever way the measure points, so percentages, days, rates and costs can share one chart and one colour rule.

Two honesty rules apply. The arithmetic breaks near zero: a target of zero cannot be divided into, and for a "lower is better" measure an actual of zero makes the division meaningless. In both cases the tool shows — rather than a confident nonsense number, and it will not save a "lower is better" target of zero at all. If your real ambition is zero defects, set the smallest meaningful target and let the measure earn its way down. And a blank is never a zero: an unentered actual stays unentered rather than scoring as nothing achieved.

Colouring is display, not arithmetic. At 100 or better a measure is green; at or above the amber threshold in Settings — 90 by default — amber; below that, red.

The owner is a person

The owner column takes a name, and only a name. Not "Operations". Not "the quality team". A department cannot stand up in a meeting, cannot be asked what happened, and cannot commit to doing something by Thursday.

The owner is deliberately separate from the team. The team is who the number describes; the owner is who is accountable for moving it. Often that is the team leader, but not always — an absence measure might be owned by whoever runs return-to-work conversations, a cost-per-order measure by whoever controls the routing. Splitting the two stops "the team" being the answer to "who is doing something about this?", which is another way of saying nobody. One name per measure: two owners is no owner.

Countermeasures

A countermeasure is what is being done about a red number: the action, the person, the date. "Monitor closely" is not a countermeasure. "Fixture check added to the shift start-up with an operator sign-off, S. Beltran, running from this period" is.

Write it when the number goes red, not at month end. Written on the day, it records what people actually believed the cause was and what they decided to try, and it is honest about being a first attempt. Written four weeks later for a report, it is reverse-engineered from whatever happened next and teaches the team nothing.

The countermeasure is also the memory. When the same measure goes red two periods later, the previous one is the most useful thing on the page: it either worked and was abandoned, or it never worked and is about to be proposed again. The No countermeasure tile counts off-target measures with nothing written against them, because that count — not the attainment average — is the real state of accountability on a board.

Review status, and why it exists

Each reading records whether the team reviewed it: not reviewed, reviewed in the team meeting, or escalated. It is the only field here that describes the meeting rather than the work, and it exists because a dashboard nobody discusses is wallpaper — an artefact that costs real time to maintain and produces nothing.

Measures drift into "not reviewed" quietly. The board runs long, the last two categories get skipped, and after a few weeks nobody expects those numbers to be mentioned. The tile that names never-reviewed measures makes that visible while it is still a habit rather than a fact. If a measure has gone unreviewed for several periods you have two honest choices: put it back in the meeting, or take it off the board. Maintaining a number nobody looks at is the worst of both.

Running the stand-up in ten minutes

Enter the readings before the meeting, never during it. Then:

1. Greens, in one breath. Name them, do not narrate them.
2. Reds, worst first. The Furthest below target chart is already in that order. For each one the owner answers two questions: what happened, and what is the countermeasure? A statement, not a discussion.
3. Reds with no countermeasure. These get the real time. Leave with something written, even if it is only "find out why by Wednesday".
4. Anything to escalate. One sentence each, and who is carrying it.

Ten minutes is achievable for six to eight measures, standing at the board. What breaks it is problem-solving in the room. If a red needs an hour of analysis, the countermeasure recorded on the day can simply be that meeting, with a name and a date on it.

Escalation

Mark a measure escalated when the countermeasure is genuinely beyond the team: a supplier contract, a capital purchase, a policy, a decision belonging to someone with different authority. This is not an admission of failure — a team that never escalates is either extraordinarily well resourced or quietly absorbing problems it cannot fix, and the second is far more common.

An escalation still needs a name and a date: who raised it, and when an answer was asked for. Without both it is a shrug with better manners. A measure that sits escalated for three periods means the escalation itself has failed, and it belongs on the agenda of whoever it was escalated to.

Where this sits alongside other tools

Three other CapsuleM8 tools measure performance, and they are not interchangeable. The Executive KPI Dashboard reports business-level measures to the people running the organisation, aggregated well above any one team. The Balanced Scorecard organises measures into four strategic perspectives to test whether the strategy is balanced across financial, customer, process and capability outcomes. The SQCDP Daily Performance Board is the tight daily version: one RAG letter per category per day, marked up at a board in seconds rather than typed.

This tool sits between them: team-level measures with real values against targets, period by period, with the owner and the countermeasure carried alongside every number.

The spreadsheet workflow

Team measures usually already live in a spreadsheet, and the toolbar keeps that route open.

• Spreadsheet template saves a CSV whose headings are exactly this tool's column names, with a guidance row showing what each column expects — the date format, and the accepted values for the category, direction and review status lists.
• Keep a master copy with the team, measure, category, unit, direction, target and owner columns filled in: that is your standard measure set. Each period, copy it, add the period end and the actuals, write the countermeasures, and delete the guidance row before saving. Keep the file as CSV.
• Import spreadsheet reads it back. Columns are matched by heading, so their order does not matter and extra columns are ignored. Rows missing a required column, or failing a validation check — an off-target measure with no countermeasure, a period end in the future — are skipped and reported by row number.

Nothing is uploaded, and importing adds to what is already here rather than replacing it. Spell each team and measure the same way every period: the movement table matches on team plus measure name, so "First-pass yield" and "First pass yield" become two measures that never appear to move.

FAQ

How often should readings be entered? Whatever period the team can act within. Use the period end date consistently so readings line up, and enter one even when nothing moved — a flat line is information, a gap is a mystery.

Why is attainment not capped? Because a measure at 180% is a real fact about the target, not a display problem. If one regularly runs far above target, look at the target. Bear in mind that a runaway measure lifts the team average, which is exactly why the team chart also prints how many measures actually reached target.

Should targets change during the year? Rarely, and openly. A target quietly lowered to turn a red green destroys the only thing a dashboard has, which is that people believe it. If the world changed, change the target and say so in the notes.

What if a measure has no sensible target? Then it is context, not a board measure. Every row here needs a target, because attainment is the whole engine and a number with no target cannot be on or off anything.

Saving your work

Readings, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the readings for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored; there is no undo. A team dashboard names individuals against numbers they missed — treat exports as confidential, and think about whether people measures should carry names at all.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The arithmetic is simple and the tool does it faithfully. What it cannot do is tell you whether the measures are the right ones, whether the targets are demanding or soft, whether a number is being gamed, or whether the readings entered are accurate — and every conclusion depends on all four.

Be honest about what attainment means. Measured against a target the team did not agree to and cannot move, attainment records compliance, not performance; the percentage looks identical either way. Attainment figures from different measures are comparable as progress-against-target, not as statements that the targets were equally demanding. Where the division is meaningless the tool shows "—" rather than pretend.

This is a management review aid — not an appraisal instrument, and not a substitute for the ten-minute conversation it exists to support. Using a dashboard like this to judge individuals rather than to improve work is the reliable way to end up with numbers that are managed instead of work that is.