Fewer dashboards.
More trust.
Hundreds of dashboards and nobody trusts the numbers. I take you from sprawl to a governed core your teams run themselves, then I make myself redundant.
Aggregated across consulting engagements at fintechs and scale-ups. Happy to walk through the detail on a call.
The cost of dashboard sprawl
Hundreds of dashboards, and the numbers underneath them stopped agreeing a long time ago. These are the sentences I hear before every rationalisation.
Nobody trusts the numbers
"Which figure is right?"
Two dashboards, two answers, and the meeting stalls on whose number to believe. Trust goes long before anyone admits it.
Hundreds of dashboards, no owners
"Ask whoever built it."
Reports pile up faster than anyone retires them, and no one is left who can say what half of them are even for.
Everyone escapes to Excel
"I export it and fix it myself."
When the reporting cannot be trusted, people quietly rebuild it in spreadsheets, and the single source of truth splinters for good.
The same operating system, every rationalisation
From two hundred dashboards to a governed core runs on a written operating system, not on my memory: eight phases, one front door for every request, and rules that do not change between engagements. The full manual ships with every engagement.
Sponsor memo, access, and a measured ad-hoc baseline before any cut.
Who depends on what, where Excel lives, and the Finance-Commercial reconciliation.
One tracker, KEEP / HOLD / DELETE with living owners, reclaim window.
Quarantine not delete, bookmark continuity, a freeze with an exception path.
The argued numbers, co-chaired, signed by both sides, compute-proven.
Lineage-first consolidation with a dual-run quarter for every table.
Hub and training, only after the cut. Measured at week six, not at the session.
One front door for every request; the refusal authority survives you.
The rules that do not change
Training runs after the cut and the dictionary, never before. Good training in a broken environment dies in six weeks; I learnt that once, at a client's expense, and the week-six gate now measures it.
A definition is agreed only when the two people who previously disagreed both sign it, or one signs and one dissents on record. Dissent is evidence, not obstruction. Nothing publishes before the model can compute it.
Requests are classified before anyone builds: exploration needs no justification, a genuine build needs an owner, a lifecycle state and signed definitions. Refusals are logged, and early on they are co-signed internally.
This is the right fit if...
- You have hundreds of dashboards and no agreed read on which ones matter.
- Your teams argue about definitions, or quietly reconcile the numbers in Excel.
- You want a governed core your teams run themselves, not more dashboards.
This is not the right fit if...
- You have very little reporting yet: that is a build, not a rationalisation.
- You want to keep everything and just tidy the folders: this cuts, with owners.
- You want a tool swap without touching governance: the sprawl grows straight back.
From sprawl to a core you trust
Every rationalisation starts with the diagnosis: two weeks to see what you have, what it costs, and which handful of dashboards are worth keeping. The cut follows from there.
30-minute call, no obligation. If it isn't the right fit, I'll say so.
The diagnosis is fixed-fee and scoped in advance. If you don't see value in the first week, we stop, and you pay half.
The diagnosis is the same fixed-fee entry for every engagement.