The dashboard reflex
When the numbers look wrong, the instinct is to build a better report. But the report is downstream of the data. Polish a dashboard built on messy data and you've just made a prettier lie.
The order that works
- Consolidate — get every source of truth into one place
- Dedupe — remove the redundancies that create reconciliation drift
- Standardize — one definition per metric, enforced at the source
- Maintain — documented procedures, not heroics
- Then build the dashboard
Why this order
Every step skipped here becomes a manual fix every month. Done once, in sequence, the dashboard you build on top actually stays trustworthy — and the team stops arguing about which number is right.