A management dashboard designed to shine a light on team performance.

At Alaska Airlines, all business groups are supported by the ITS Service Desk team. From creating new user accounts to issues with bag tag kiosks, the Service Desk processes hundreds of support tickets per day.

When a new service provider was hired in 2018 for Service Desk support, leadership found that they needed better tools to monitor the new team’s performance.

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There was already a dashboard used to monitor the department, but it was falling short in a number of ways. Most of all, it didn't calculate the combined metrics for the three workgroups that made up the team. Leads grew frustrated to the point that they would run their own queries to calculate metrics for weekly status meetings. This inevitably brought discrepancies and friction,  wasting a lot of time in the process.

After evaluating the dashboard and having conversations with leadership, I defined my goals for the project. 

• Design must be clear and easy to understand.
• Critical metrics need to be prominent and reflect SLA compliance.
• Include filters that effect the entire dashboard
• Include navigation to other parts of the IT Management tool.
• Explore ways to display Customer Satisfaction.
  

To get started, I used a simple sticky note excercise with my manager to list and prioritize the stats needed on the dashboard. I made a wireframe in Visio to make sure everything was accounted for, and arranged in a way that made sense. Since the most critical aspect of this project was the data itself, I produced an MVP with just the top metrics at first. I then refined the visuals progressively, while the reporting criteria was fine-tuned.

After I was able to deliver a functioning first version, I added Alaska brand elements and navigation, so that screenshots of the dashboard would be presentable to higher-level management as well as other teams. We didn’t have a design system at the time, so I did my best to to match existing elements from Alaskaair.com and other internal sources, while working within the constraints of the ticketing & reporting system.

After a few rounds of tweaking (and a little bit of scope creep,) the new design was a success. The dashboard helped management solidify their definitions around their contract agreement and leadership no longer had to spend hours carefully calculating their metrics to ensure SLA compliance. Additionally, management had more visibility into customer satisfaction, including survey completion rates and customer satisfaction ratings, both as a whole and per-agent.

The new Happiness Score, modeled after a Net Promoter Score, is a metric we added that measures customer satisfaction with support interactions. It's valuable to managers because it provides a quick, quantifiable way to gauge customer happiness, helping them identify areas for improvement and track the success of their support efforts.

The difference is night and day. The new dashboard calculates any designated range of data in a matter of seconds where previously it took several hours a week to manually produce reports. Sean made any criteria tweaks I needed quickly, and the whole process was extremely collaborative.

Dia Cooper, ITS Service Desk Manager