Google Apps Tips - Creating a Dashboard

Creating a Dashboard

Whether you have a complex involving many members or simple project having handful of team members - a dashboard enhances the visibility and helps in tracking. In an addition to your project management tools small communication is the key to project success, particularly around sharing status and progress updates to keep everyone moving in sync through each milestone.

Since Google spreadsheets are shared on the web and have rich formatting capabilities, they're the perfect tool to help coordinate fast-paced, ad-hoc projects. Here is how to create your own - simple but powerful project dashboard:

* Start with creating a new Google spreadsheet and invite your project team to the document
* Create four columns: Milestone, Owner, Status, and Notes
* Meet with your team to collaboratively identify, record, and assign project milestones in the project dashboard
* As the project progresses, use fill to update the status cells with green, yellow, or red to indicate progress, and record any issues in the 'Notes' field

Add additional columns like due date, etc. based on your particular project's needs.

You can share your sheet with other team members to collarobate, with others within or outside organization to just view (need to publish). You can even add the same to your Google Sites Page.