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One Chart That Tells Your KPI's Complete Story
With Nick Desbarats, practical data visualisation expert, we have designed one chart that tells the complete story of your KPI, based on the XmR chart.
Imagine having one chart for each of your KPIs that can answer all the questions you have when you're monitoring performance and deciding what action you might need to take:
- Where is performance right now?
- Is it getting better or worse?
- How far away from target is it?
- Is it possible for us to reach the target in time?
- What impact has our change initiative had on performance?
- Do we need to take any action now?
This one chart I'm talking about isn't entirely new. It's based on an XmR chart which has been part of performance monitoring history for over 100 years. But this one chart has other vital information included with it, and is designed in a way that the questions above can be answered in mere seconds. Let's start, though, with why the XmR is the basis for our KPI monitoring.
In PuMP, we've always used the XmR chart as the basis for our KPI reporting. If you're new to XmR charts, or want a quick refresher, one or more of the following articles here might be worth a read (or scan) so you can get the full value from this article:
XmR Chart Design 2.0
Currently, the design of the XmR chart we use in PuMP was a collaboration with Stephen Few (now retired) to make these charts more visually appealing, more quickly able to draw the eye to the right comparisons, and relatively easy to build using simple apps like Microsoft Excel. Most software-produced XmR charts (we'll call them "XmR Chart Design 1.0") don't follow the modern and improved data visualisation design
principles that Stephen has developed. And they don't make use of targets the way we do in PuMP.
In truth, we focused only on the X part of the XmR chart (the X part is where the KPI data is charted), but still refer to the chart as XmR so it's clear the theoretical foundation it has. And this is how our "XmR 2.0" chart looks:
From this version of the XmR chart, we can easily see changes in the KPI over time (patterns of points relative to the blue central line and the shaded blue range of normal variation), we can calculate the size of those changes (the shift in the blue central line), and we can then see how far the KPI is from its target (the blue dot to the right).
In redesigning this chart to improve it further, practical reporting guru Nick Desbarats and I took another look at it. Nick worked closely with Stephen Few, and it seems only natural that he is the one to take our XmR 2.0 to the next level.
XmR Chart Design 3.0
And here it is, the new design by Nick Desbarats for "XmR 3.0":
Nick made quite a few very noticeable changes! Some changes bring out more context about the KPI. Some changes make visual interpretation faster. Some changes are additional information we didn't have on XmR 2.0. Here's a summary of the most notable changes:
- The title summarises both the KPI name and its key signal and cause.
- A subtitle is added to provide the KPI's description (we decide this in the Measure Design we do in Step 3 of PuMP).
- The horizontal scale makes it easier to anchor the timing of signals in the KPI, like the outlier in the second quarter of 2009.
- The targets look like targets, and they are colour-coded to match the parts of the XmR chart they relate to, like the grey target for the grey central line.
- The upper and lower natural process limits are colour-coded to make it easier to see which direction we want the KPI to move in (green is good, orange is bad).
- Outliers follow the colour-coding of the respective natural process limit they fall outside of.
- The most important signal in the chart, as summarised in the title, is also visually highlighted by the blue circle.
After some testing with our PuMP Community around the world, to try out the XmR 3.0 with their KPIs, Nick and I will finalise this design and it will then become the official chart we use in PuMP for displaying KPIs in reports and dashboards.
In the meantime, if you're keen to play with this design, you can learn how to build the basic XmR chart here. Then you can watch the full video below on Nick's YouTube channel, and follow along as Nick takes us through the reasoning and exploring that produced this stunning XmR 3.0 design. I hope you also discover the power of this one chart that tells a KPI's complete story:
For more insights on excellent reporting and data visualisation, visit Nick Desbarats here: https://www.practicalreporting.com
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