The are many ways to organize and present a dashboard page. For me, I will never miss this little box on a corner to highlight major points.
Usually when any project control professional starts to prepare any progress dashboard, especially those which are represented in special occasions such as board meeting or steering committees, they are overwhelmed with the tons of information that they need to show. This sometime distract us from focusing on the main points which we must tell before going into any details.
I’ve been in this situation for hundreds of times. Sometimes I find myself going in detailing the reasons of the delays and the issue and the risks without telling the attendees about the number of delayed days and the basic Earned Value indices. For that, I learned that small margin in the corner to highlight the subject and the major information will not miss me during the show.
Of course the rest of the paper will be including the other information which you need to tell, and as I strongly recommend to let the rest of the paper support the major points in your margin. It is not a proper organization for your dashboard to let the margin refer to the project calendar and Earned value indices, while the rest of the page is concerning the issues and the risks or some thing related to cost overrun for example, just make it consistent and pretty.
This Dashboard Is Sponsored By Chartenia