Indicator Filtering - Best Practices

You may have already noticed this when designing and deploying your scorecards - the scorecard filtering by status is dependent on the indicator. For example, take a look at the following scorecard; there are both target indicators (stoplights) and trend indicators (arrows).

When selecting the filter status for the scorecard, you are presented with a myriad of options some that may be named the same thing. For example, in the above scorecard, I would see the following filter status options:

Notice that I see 4 different filter status options for "Slightly Off Target" and 2 for "Off Target". This results from using 2 different indicators in the same scorecard, in this case stoplights and trends. Now, take a look at the default settings for each of those indicators. Notice that for the stoplight indicator - if you have left it unmodified - you see the following:

For the trend you see (if unmodified):

Notice that for the trend the three center indicators all show a display name of "Slightly Off Target" - so in the above sample scorecard, 3 of the "Slightly Off Target" indicators come from this indicator, one representing the slight down trend, one the flat trend and one the slight up trend. The fourth "Slightly Off Target" comes from the yellow stoplight indicator.

A best practice is to modify your display names so that you can easily recognize the different indicators to filter by in your scorecard. A better naming convention for the trend indicator would be as follows:

This would result in the following scorecard filtering view in the completed dashboard:

This results in a scorecard filtering option that is easy to understand and interpret.

Alyson Powell Erwin (alysonp@microsoft.com)