Help Desk | Executive Overview (1/3)

This is part 1 of a 3 part series exploring the iterative process of dashboard development. Want to learn more about what inspired this idea? Check out my LinkedIn post here.

Executive Overview dashboard that gives the team a highlevel overview of the help desk.

The Ask:

• Dashboard that shows the business a high-level overview of the ticket pipeline.

• MoM comparison across tickets.

• Ability to select into specific ticket types and see the breakdown across Owner Group, Issue Category, and Severity.

• Flexibility to select a month.

• Easy to read and understand.

Deliverable:

• A Tableau dashboard focused on simplicity and intuitive interactivity.

• Month selector at the top and center so a user can quickly select which month they are interested in highlighting.

• Multiple indicators to give the end user quick insights with little effort.

Additional Requests:

• An additional view for ticket information that should be accessible from the main page.

• Detailed ticket list displaying additional information such as requestor name, satisfaction score, owner group, issue category, and severity.

• The end users want to slice the data by the following fields: satisfaction score, owner group, issue category, severity, and ticket status.

  
  

Feature Highlight: Indicator Icon

Indicator Icon showing increase or decrease compared to previous month.

I love incorporating this feature because it allows the user to quickly identify when a month performed worse than the previous month. To create this feature in a future dashboard, you will need to utilize the LOOKUP function.

What is the LOOKUP Function?

The LOOKUP function is a table calculation in Tableau. In simple terms, depending on the setup of your calculation, it will look up a value to compare to the current value in your data.

This is the explanation you see when you use it in Tableau:

“Returns the value of the given expression in a target row, specified as a relative offset from the current row. Use FIRST()+n and LAST()-n for a target relative to the first/last rows in the partition. If offset is omitted, the Compare To row may be set on the field menu. Returns NULL if the target row cannot be determined.”

Want to give it a try?

This is the calculation I used:

(COUNT([Ticket Number])) - LOOKUP(COUNT([Ticket Number]), -1) >0

Calculation explanation:

• (COUNT([Ticket Number]))

  • Counting the total ticket number

• - LOOKUP(COUNT([Ticket Number]), -1)

  • Subtracting the previous count of total ticket numbers be an offset of -1. This means it looks up the previous value compared to the current value. This is why the first value will always appear as NULL, as there is no previous value to compare.

• >0

  • This is added to the calculation to make it a Boolean. For this use case, I wanted to identify the months that performed better or worse compared to the previous month.

Explore the dashboard on Tableau Public.