Feedback received in helping us to finalize our first pass on delivery.
Feedback on High Level View
Name | Comment (s) | Response/Action Plan |
Shannon Bradley | Is there a way to lock the location of the boxes – I accidently clicked and the box moved on me | In the Tableau dashboard the views will be created and published and will not be able to be edited by users. The excel is to help lead the discussion about what is possible |
Shannon Bradley | Will you be able to see the high level view by project or by Lead | The view that will be used more by project/lead will be the Account Detail Tab |
Ron Payne | There are no charts or pivot data shown in the tab but I get the general idea. The ability to filter the expenditure information (e.g. encumbered, activity code type, uncommitted balance, etc.) would be useful for large, complicated projects. Many times there is a need to slice the budgeted and spent data in multiple ways. | It looks like there were filters selected and not cleared out, I have cleared the filters so you should see a pie chart now! |
Ron Payne | If bar charts or line charts will be used, the ability to add a trend line for expenditures would be good information. | I anticipate this will be in the lower level views that would show up under Account Detail, when we start to look at individual groups or accounts. But this is something that we should determine how to represent to upper level management that would be using this dashboard. |
Bill Kramer | There needs to be the ability to have organizations that are not within directorates. For example, the NFI activity (still labelled BWPO) is hosted (gets support services) in NCSA for an initial period but reports primarily directly to Susan Martinis so it is not in a directorate. I believe there is at least one other group being set up like that also as a parallel organization being hosted initially by NCSA. So, the structure and tables has to be able to accommodate such activities. | I think we can take care of this by using the grouping tool in BA4. The groups need cleaned up and defined, but this should be another source of data for the Tableau dashboards. |
Feedback on Account Detail Tab
Name | Comment(s) | Response/Action Plan |
Shannon Bradley | What would I use this for? | The Account Detail tab would be the view that goes into more detail at the group and directorate level |
Ron Payne | I don’t see a tab labeled “Account Detail” but I do see tabs labeled “Activity Code Data” and “Transaction Level Data”. The latter is very useful in multiple ways as it separates participant support from staff and equipment, shows encumbrance, and the uncommitted balance. | It looks like the tab name got deleted! It was showing as Sheet 9, I have renamed it back to Account Detail! The Two “Activity Code Data” and “Transaction Level Data” are the raw numbers used for the dashboard in the first two tabs. |
Kjellrun Olson & Bill Kramer | Kjellrun: Is there a way to add reporting periods when viewing the data? Calendar Year (Jan-Dec), State Fiscal Year (July – June) and Project Year (Dependant on project). Bill: I hope the dat ranges for retrieval and display are not just FY and quarter. The date ranges should be completely definable and be able to span FY. And the date resolution should be definable, from years, to quarters to months to weeks to days. Why, because a lot of times our funding does not align with state fiscal years and we have to share/report information say on Federal FY basis or on contract quarter (we have a new contract starting today that reports quarterly from the start date) | I think we should be able to do this, will need to look into what features we can add in Tableau to do this.
|
Kjellrun Olson | How can we best show how actuals have compared to budgets each month? |
|
Bill Kramer | Would like to see what is being spent by individuals and groups that we are funding without have to do it manually. So, for example I need to know how much is budgeted for say Blue Waters work being done by the Network group over time. As PI I should be able to see at least funding that my project provide for any set of groups and not just in a direct management hierarchy. That includes the ICR that the group receives from my projects. If that is not in the current design, it very much needs to be. | Requested more info here. If the data is in BA4 I think we can do this. But I anticipate that there is data manipulation happening outside of BA4 that we will need to understand. It is possible that this could be done with another reference table in MIS, or for some of this it sounds like what we would want to pull in from a PPM tool. |
Bill Kramer | Not everyone worked with CFOPs and recognize the numbers. We have multiple CFOPs with the projects for different reasons. So, CFOPs have to have readable descriptions with them all the time, and not cause someone like me to have to go off somewhere to look things up. For us, no individual CFOP shows the entire project’ activities so it is very important to be able to merge the financial data for multiple CFOPs together. It would be nice to let a user establish these relationships and have them persistent across sessions. | A few things here:
|
Bill Kramer | I want to see with a CFOP, by type of expense. I think the pull down menu implied that ability but would like to confirm it. A question that is very important for example is how much we are spending in power and cooling costs and how it compares to budget. | We will need to find if the account numbers are detailed in BA4 – if not then we will need to pull the reference table from Banner to pull in the account descriptions so that we can allow this view.
|
Other thoughts or ideas about how you would like to see this data presented?
Name | Comment(s) | Response/Action Plan |
Angela Douglas | While we wait for the longer term projections to be added, can we add a straight line projection for spending? |
|
Ron Payne | Forecasting would be a HUGE benefit! Even better would be to allow for the user to select how forecasting is calculated (e.g. burn rate of last # months, cyclical patterning, etc.). This type of information and ability would have saved staff months and likely staff years throughout the XSEDE project. |
|
Kjellrun Olson | Show Account shortnames rather than the CFOPA strings |
|
Colleen Bushell | What would be great is to have the “high-level” overview of all the accounts together. It seems that most views I have used in the past are very detailed, and its difficult to get the overview. What has always been useful too is to be able to see the total of the monthly expenses for each budget (so again, not all the line items, but see just to totals along with the F&A for that month that is charged. Another aspect that would help – for contracts that get invoiced monthly – is to see the incoming funds balance each month. |
|
Laura Martin | Are we able to get detailed categories broken out (Academic Salary, Capital Equip, Fringe Benefits, etc). It would be nice to have to automatically categorize on a monthly basis with a total. For example, I could easily pull data that shows in June I spent $15,345 in salary on CFOP A. Currently, I manually go through expenses on a monthly basis to categorize and align with my project budgets and use the information to forecast. |
|
Laura Martin | The transaction level data tab - will this include all categories and not just expenditure and encumbrance naming? The detailed categories is super helpful in reviewing spending vs budgets. For example, for an airline charge this would say 'Domestic Travel' and this tab just lists as 'Expenditure' |
|
Jong Lee | Expenditure projection over time per project. That would be very helpful information since most of time spending on the accounting is how to use the funding all within the project period. Also, maybe it is nothing to do with the dashboard. But it’s good to see the expenditures along with proposed budget by item, so that PI can identify what spending plan is needed |
|
What all do you hope to see in these dashboards as we continue to improve them over time?
Name | Comment(s) | Response/Action Plan |
Shannon Bradley | If I am a PI – or a PM that works for a PI that has multiple projects – to be able to look at the projects they are responsible for and see a projection for if they are going to be overspent and have a 1 month view to see if spending looks correct for the month. |
|
Ron Payne | Because of the diversity of accounts and projects in the Center, out financial reporting tools need to be highly customizable. Understanding that this typically leads to complexity and lower intuitive functions, I think it would be VERY helpful to have two sets of interfaces: basic and advanced. The basic version would be straight forward and simplified based on a set of pre-determined “commonly needed” reports. This would accommodate most of the PIs/Project Leads, PMs, and Directorate leads. The advanced set would be used by the larger and/or more complex projects, it would also be used by the Directorate leads to “drill down” into an area of note. I would suggest the Project Leads, managers, and PMs be trained on the basic set and the PMs and BO be trained on the advanced set. |
|
Bill Kramer | The most important thing I hope this tool brings me is the ability to do spending and budget projections. That has to be done manually and is cumbersome. The questions I need to answer include -
| I think that this is going to require the use of a PPM tool to accomplish, without that I am not sure where this projection data could live across multiple projects and groups. And to utilize in Tableau effectively and efficiently it will be necessary for this data to only pull from one location |
Bill Kramer | I assume we can have delegates authorized to see the data I see as PI or manager |
|