Practice Management Dashboard

To set a reference point, I surveyed high, medium, and low-production advisors based on an established scorecard for practice management competency. But, results showed no correlation between production and competency — even the high producers scored poorly.

In follow-up interviews, I discovered that advisors receive no business training and only learn to run their practice through trial and error. Many had sought a coach or taken seminars, and nearly all clung to the company’s internal business consultants (BCs) for direction.

Interviewing the BCs, I found that, unless an advisor knew how to track their production, they depended on the BCs for a quarterly report that explained their performance. The BCs also met with advisors to discuss production improvement strategies, creating untenable demand.

To the BCs, improving production only required tracking KPIs and responding appropriately, something easily taught. But, if this were true, advisors would eventually learn how to track their production, and the dependency on the BCs would decrease, which was not happening.

Returning to the advisor interview data, I discovered that large producers were advisories that had more bandwidth to focus on customer relationships. These advisors relied on the BCs not out of incompetence but time-savings.

I brought the BCs and the design team together, presented the research, and led them through a series of opportunity-framing exercises. By the session’s end, we identified an objective of solving for a semi-competent advisor requiring a way to understand production but not having enough time to learn.

I brought the groups together again for a workshop, along with the data lake team. We reviewed the BCs’ quarterly production report. I then challenged the group to imagine what the advisor interaction might be like if K.I.T.T. (the intelligent car from the TV series Knight Rider) had been a business consultant — since the BCs’ charts informed advisors in the same manner as car gauges.

The group brought back a trove of ideas. The designers’ concepts revolved around information presentation. The BCs’ concepts focused on conveying management advice, and the data team suggested ways to calculate the KPIs on the backend.

I guided the teams in prioritizing the concepts. A question of feasibility arose, but the BCs felt the logic behind their advice was codifiable, and the data team was confident they could code an algorithm for it.

I facilitated working sessions with the design team and consolidated the ideas into a vision for an interactive dashboard that dynamically displayed improvement tips. The BCs grew more excited as the solution came into focus.