Monitoring Dashboard

Origin. Statistical process control (Shewhart); balanced scorecard.

Mechanism. Maintains a small set of indicators with declared thresholds and a declared response per threshold. The discipline is in declaring the response before observing the indicator.

Procedure. Select indicators that are proximate to the mechanism, not to the outcome. State the control limits. State the action at each limit, in advance. Distinguish common-cause from special-cause variation; do not act on common-cause variation.

Applies to. Ongoing operation of a system whose failure is gradual.

Limitations. Goodhart's law: an indicator that becomes a target ceases to measure. Reacting to common-cause variation — tampering, in Deming's term — provably increases variance, a result Deming demonstrated with the funnel experiment. Most dashboard use is tampering.