We are delighted to announce the release of OrgVue v2.8 to the OrgVue Demo environment on 5th September 2013, and to the Live environment on 26th September 2013.
The new release offers major new functionality in Charting, Dashboards and Property Management, along with many further improvements in usability and performance.
1. Charting:
New types of charts:
- Column charts
- Column % charts
- Line charts
We have added the new types of chart to the existing bar charts in response to client requests. Column charts and line charts allow users to show changes over time, which are usually shown from left to right.
Column charts:
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Column charts allow you to show comparable size of an entity over time or by group. This column chart shows, performance by age group, coloured by age. |
Column % charts:
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Column % charts allow you to show comparable percentage breakdowns of entities that might differ greatly in size. In this case, the breakdown of IT sales by store into hardware, services and software is much easier to compare if the scale is normalised to 100%. |
Line charts:
Column % charts allow you to show comparable percentage breakdowns of entities that might differ greatly in size. In this case, the breakdown of IT sales by store into hardware, services and software is much easier to compare if the scale is normalised to 100%.
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Line charts allow you to show trends over time in a variable. It is ideal for variables that are bucketed into time intervals. OrgVue now offers you the ability to bucket into time intervals by month, quarter or year. |
2. Dashboards:
Users have asked us more often for dashboards than for anything else. We have taken all the requests, reduced them to the common elements and created 10 generic dashboard types available to all our users, offering potentially hundreds of applications.
The OrgVue team can now publish dashboards to all tenants, or can restrict dashboards to particular tenants or datasets with specific data (e.g. having 2 date fields).
Dashboard can now be controlled by selecting variables, Dates from and to, Period Length covered and Number of Periods displayed. Dashboard examples are shown below.
| # | Dashboard type | Example use case |
| 1 | * Absence Report | Absence instances, Joiners, Leavers, HolidaysRequires two date fields (e.g. start date & end date) and level of tolerance can be set |
| 2 | Bar Chart Matrix | Gender split of total revenues, average tenure etc. – useful for analysis by any binary variable, as dimensions with two values are displayed with the two values back-to-back |
| 3 | Diversity | Diversity tracking and reporting: checking for comparative treatment of multiple groups on multiple variables in the data |
| 4 | * Event by Period | Maternity leaveRequires at least one date field |
| 5 | * Headcount by Date | Organisation, department or team growth and shrinkage over time. Requires two date fields (for start date & end date). Can differentiate voluntary and involuntary leavers |
| 6 | Leaderboard | Top performers per team; top paid staff; staff with highest absence rates; staff with longest journeys to work etc. etc. |
| 7 | Process dashboard | Shows process steps in terms of Activities, Decisions and Deliverables. Configurable by colour, depth, icon. Can be linked to people, roles, products, clients etc. |
| 8 | Quality | Quality report giving immediate view of a newly loaded dataset. What the data includes and whether the data is complete, including whether the hierarchy includes orphans and orphan groups. Powerful for tracking improvement in data quality over time. |
| 9 | Scatter Chart Matrix | Classic scatter charts produced immediately for a range of variables on the same page |
| 10 | Team View | Showing matrix reports for a manager. Requires main reporting line and (if needed) secondary reporting line, then shows dotted line relationships |
* = Dashboards that are only exposed when suitable data fields are available (to avoid overwhelming the user with additional non-relevant dashboards).
1. Absence Report
Each manager can be get an Absence Report for their area, or HR can provide one report for the whole business. It can be used for any time-bound variable – Maternity Leave, ‘holidays’, ‘absence’, ‘birthdays’, ‘training’ or any activity with a start and finish date.
2. Bar chart matrix:
The bar chart matrix provides a quick summary of any dimension against one – or any number of – measures. In this case, the bar chart is coloured by performance.
3. Diversity:
The diversity dashboard gives a quick view of population breakdown, then summarises that population versus any number of measures. In this case, the pie chart shows gender breakdown:
4. Event by Period
The event by period dashboard shows a yearly, quarterly or monthly view of any dated event occurring in a population – in this case, when Maternity Leave has happened.
5. Headcount by Date
The headcount by date dashboard shows total headcount, and breaks down the flow of joiners and leavers to show the degree of change in a workforce over time.
6. Leaderboard:
The leaderboard allows you to show any key metric – in this case, performance ranking in terms of named individuals who are present in different groups.
7. Process Dashboard:
No more PowerPoint slides covered in chevrons! Those slides don’t do anything – don’t link to costs, time taken, store data, and they are painful to maintain. We have built a process map which is interactive, simple and clear. OrgVue can offer generic process maps for each major business function, including IT, Finance, HR, Marketing, Manufacturing and Logistics.
8. Quality:
A favourite dashboard for users. In one view you get a sense of the distribution and completeness of the data elements. How many orphans? Spans of control? How many levels? How many orphan groups? The quality dashboard is the first place to look after loading a new dataset for the first time.
9. Scatter Chart Matrix
An easy way to eyeball the correlations of several variables at the same time. For example, what are the relationships between pay and performance, tenure and performance, performance and potential, absence rates and grade, and so on and so on.
10. Team View
The most common request we had was to show matrix reporting lines on the same organisation chart. OrgVue now helps you do that automatically – displaying as many additional reporting lines as you want to show.
11. Competencies
An eleventh example – just for fun. The competencies dashboard has been developed and can now show a range of competencies and how they link to people at levels 1-4 of competency. The competencies can then be added up across people, or competencies themselves to identify gaps or hotspots.
3. Properties
1. Property Management
OrgVue now allows much greater flexibility to administrators in setting up and managing properties. This can help when managing properties, copying properties, filtering or protecting properties. Administrators can now:
- Duplicate a property within a dataset
- Copy all properties from a dataset at once
- Filter to show only a subset of properties and copy them all to clipboard to paste into another dataset. (If into a dataset with the same named property already, it offers an alternative name)
2. Property Protection:
Administrators and dataset owners can now protect property definitions and order, with user access rights for a dataset able to be set as ‘View’ (the lowest), ‘Update’ (to change values only) or ‘Edit’ (highest: able to edit properties themselves).
3. Using Aliases for properties:
Using aliases for properties allows you to use existing dashboards and expressions in datasets that do not name their properties in the same way.
How to use Aliases for properties:
- Dashboards requiring specific named properties (e.g. “Salary”) can be used in datasets that do not have a property of that name, by assigning the alias ‘Salary’ to a relevant property
- Either the Alias or the original Key can be used to drive dashboards
- Either the Alias or the original Key can also operate in Expressions
- Aliases may be used to simplify writing expressions, for example, in the case of a property key with a long string
- The display name cannot be used in Expressions
Find Property:
The OrgVue Property Pane now offers you the option to search properties, and show only those matching a set criteria – for example, any property whose name contains the word ‘number’:
Any property that is a particular type can be searched for by type:
Tag a Property:
Properties can be tagged through the Property Pane, edit property dialog:
Any property that is tagged can also be searched for by tag:
4. Easier interaction:
Date formatting
Date formatting, e.g. yyyy, MMM-yy now also sets the division of data into buckets.
Toolbar
Filter indicator – now shows how many filters are currently applied.
Parent by – the ‘parent by’ control which allows you to show alternative hierarchies, can now be accessed from the org chart.
Pagination in pinned reports
Pinned reports now include Pagination settings, so you can have exactly the view that you want.
Dimension sorting
Dimension sorting has now been extended so that it applies to every output (pivot tables, filters, bar charts, column charts, and so on). The principles of sorting are still applied as they were before, so dimensions are sorted in precedence according to:
- The Lookup dataset order (the order of nodes in lookup dataset)
- The Lookup expression (as set in the property pane)
- Natural sort order (numerical, alphabetical, Boolean etc.)
Pivot view:
Pivot view now includes options to ‘show blank’ and ‘show empty’ – very useful for moving people around a 9-box grid, for example.
Questions / Comments:
If you have any questions or comments, please contact us:
info@orgvue.com – 020 0799 6910