I found the great quote for my headline from a collection of project management sayings from Steven Seay’s ProjectSteps blog. I thought it was quite quirky and relevant not only to project management in general but also to today’s discussion on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboards.

Last week, I wrote a post about conditional formatting, one of the new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and this week I thought I’d share with you some information about dashboards, another feature that is surely going to make it easier to manage more information about your project, and identify when something does go wrong.

Up until now, the only way to view information about your project from different areas of IPM has been to open multiple windows, or run a report. Now, CRM 2011 has introduced dashboards that can display snapshots of each user’s desired information from the one screen.

These customisable dashboards can display data in real time and can incorporate information from all over IPM and CRM. This means you can choose which data you want to display and set it up without the cost and time involved with IT support. Choose to display all your outstanding RFIs, or a graph showing your budget and schedule information, whichever you need to manage your project the best. This way you can see at a glance what is happening all over your project.

As an extension of the dashboard feature, you can also set up graphical representations of your data, with the ability to drill-down into certain segments of the graph to get more detailed information about that particular part. And as with most Microsoft CRM features, the graphs can be customised according to each user, giving users the most accurate and appropriate information for their particular job.

So when everything feels like it’s going right, make sure it actually is with CRM 2011’s new dashboards feature. To see how dashboards and other new features of MS Dynamics CRM 2011 are enhancing IPM, contact us for a free demo.