What is a Dashboard?
A dashboard presents project health at a glance — KPIs, trends, RAG statuses, burn charts — tailored to its audience: executives get benefits and forecasts, teams get flow and blockers. Its design rule: every element should provoke a decision or be deleted.
The failure mode is the watermelon dashboard — green outside, red inside — which is a reporting-culture problem no chart library fixes. Honest thresholds and trend lines (not just current status) are the antidote.
Worked example
A program dashboard shows five tiles: milestone confidence, cost forecast vs baseline, top risks by exposure, benefits tracking, and a trend arrow on each. The steering committee's June meeting takes forty minutes instead of two hours — and when the cost arrow turns down two months before the number itself goes red, the conversation happens early, which is the entire return on the dashboard.