Unit 13.00: Scoping the dashboard and its decision

The capstone starts with the decision, the audience and what the dashboard refuses to show.

Four checks on the brief

Decision, audience, question, comparison, summary sentence, refusals and limits.

The code prints a brief and checks it.

import json

brief = {
    "decision": "which two suppliers to renegotiate with this quarter",
    "audience": "procurement lead and the finance business partner",
    "they_already_know": "the supplier list and roughly what each costs",
    "question": "which suppliers cost most per unit relative to volume?",
    "comparison": "cost per unit across suppliers, one quarter, volume shown",
    "summary_sentence": "Two suppliers account for 60% of spend at above-median "
                        "unit cost.",
    "refuses_to_show": ["individual buyer performance", "anything by named staff"],
    "limits": ["one quarter", "excludes freight", "list price, not landed cost"],
}
print(json.dumps(brief, indent=2))

checks = [("names a decision", "which" in brief["decision"]),
          ("summary is a claim, not a description",
           "%" in brief["summary_sentence"]),
          ("limits are stated", len(brief["limits"]) >= 3),
          ("says what it will not show", len(brief["refuses_to_show"]) > 0)]
for check, ok in checks:
    print(f"  {'OK  ' if ok else 'FAIL'} {check}")

refuses_to_show is the field that is easiest to skip and hardest to add later. "Individual buyer performance" is data the source contains and the dashboard must not surface, and deciding that now avoids an uncomfortable conversation after someone has seen it.

The summary sentence carries a figure, which is what makes it a claim the charts can fail to support.

The mistake this prevents

The mistake is writing the brief around the data you have. Write it around the decision, then find out whether the data supports it - discovering it does not is a finding worth having on day one.

Takeaway

Write the brief around the decision, with a summary sentence containing a figure and an explicit list of what the dashboard will not show.

Mark complete