1. A Dashboard for Managing Resources
The client: The National Autistic Society
The leading UK charity for autistic people (including those with Asperger syndrome) and their families.
The client’s problem
How should the NAS (1) allocate personnel time across different channels to provide support to autistic people or their families, and (2) convince donors about the benefits that could be provided with more resources?
The solution
Create an Excel-based dashboard
Use data already being gathered
Use parameters that are intuitively conveyed and understood to transform this data into metrics for managers and donors
Use graphs to give a bird’s eye view of these metrics thus obtained over the past two months by week.
The approach
We first identified the problem through focus groups with the managers and their director. We obtained the managers’ agreement on the way forward being an Excel-based dashboard so the managers could see how resources were used in the recent past across different support channels – phone, , etc. – and what (notional) benefits were provided as a result. We also agreed it would be useful to show that unattended calls or unanswered s represented an opportunity for providing benefits and what resources would be necessary in availing these missed benefits. Finally, we obtained some of the data that would be needed. We built a proof-of-concept for the focus group, and then submitted the final product.
The benefits
Using easy-to-enter data and parameters, managers get a dashboard view of the past two months, by week, of
How personnel resources were used across different channels – numbers of requests handled and the personnel-related costs
Relative benefits and total desk costs of the work by staff and volunteers
Weekly funding needed to resource supporter requests not currently handled - stacked by channel (useful to show to donors).
The contact centre team are extremely pleased with the final product. It's really impressive as a means of managing the contact centre's resources and understanding the relationship between costs and benefits. – Ian Dale, Head of Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, National Autistic Society.