In the last post I talked through my approach to scoreboards and that they should focus on the higher-level issue of "how are we progressing towards our North Star"? In this post I look at how to use those dashboards and why they're important.
Course correction. I could just leave the post at two words. If you had said you're going to achieve a certain value of a metric by a set time - that's what the team broadly exists to achieve, then you have to be constantly nudging the team towards achieving that goal. It may even be more pointy than that in that you may need to make the case for organisational change.
It's akin to navigating the Atlantic in a sail boat (nb I watch M Jambo a lot who does this). You're constantly looking at progress towards your journey, what resources you have, what the environment is like, the health and safety of those around you, the state of the vessel you're in. It's the same with SEO and getting to your end of year goals. You should be using that dashboard I spoke about to communicate where you are against your plan, what the environment is like and navigating those 'rocks' (excuse the pun).
The key part of the analogy is 'course correction'. With the departmental dashboard and the reports on your rocks, you should have all the information you require to course correct. The cadence of accountability comes in that you need those weekly departmental sessions to go through the departmental dashboard to discuss progress, risks, dependencies, blockers and next steps.
This alone, is almost meaningless, however. You also need that willingness and culture of course correction. You need that open dialogue about "this isn't working anymore, we need to solve this differently". And that is awesome if conducted constructively.
The willingness of a leader to listen to the team, or stand-up themselves and say "what we thought would work, hasn't, so we need to find a new way". This is particularly difficult if you have sunk costs on technology or 3rd party support. It is essential to recognise that it is specifically that you have these sunk costs that you need to change course, because you'll compound those costs with opportunity costs and credibility costs when leadership find out that you knew something wasn't working and did nothing about it.
Sometimes it comes from a fear of the unknown. Sometimes from a fear of not wanting to show that you weren't right, sometimes you don't want to upset the relationship with 3rd parties. But you are there to deliver results. Just like a football manager leaving their star player on the bench for a title-deciding game, you are there to make tough decisions. Take them. Don't be reckless, but also be fearless.
Report on how you changed direction. The RAG status will show when things aren't working. Show how you've changed direction. Whether that's how you are approaching a problem. It could be that you've deprioritised a rock, or even that you've you've removed it completely.
Keep iterating on the dashboards too. Hopefully you've got resource that can adequately manage your dashboards. Don't constantly change the ones you present to leadership, batch those changes. But show that you're listening to the important voices of how you report progress, deliver insight and change direction when prudent.