Setting goals

Align your dashboard with your organization’s policies by setting goals. With goals, you can set and track the progress of business objectives.

About this task

You create a goal from the Goals tab. A goal complements a dashboard by providing it purpose, scope, and structure. You write the details of a specific objective you want to achieve, define the timeframe for achieving an objective, and define identifiers (categories and colors) for the goal.

From the Goals tab, you see all of the goals that you created. Goals are visible only to the user who creates them.

From the Dashboards tab, during the creation or modification of a dashboard, you can associate charts with goals. Doing so enables you to visualize in one place all of the measurements that contribute to a goal. The goal visualization appears at the top of the associated chart.

Procedure

Create a goal:
1. From the Goals tab, select Create.
2. Enter a unique name for your goal.
  The names of available goals appear in the drop-down list under Business context when you edit a chart.
3. Enter a description for your goal.
  A good description specifies the specific, measurable actions that must be done to achieve your goal.
  If the goal description includes HTTPS URLs, the links can be opened directly or from the tooltip, which shows the full description. A confirmation dialog appears the first time that you open a link for a domain before you navigate outside Business Performance Center. Links from confirmed domains open without the dialog, which appears again only for links from new domains.
4. Select a distinct color to help you quickly identify a goal.
5. Enter a category to associate similar goals.
  A category is a label that you can use to identify or give additional information to a goal.
6. Set a priority: Low, Medium, or High.
  This category is personal and helps you group the goals by importance.
7. Define your scope by setting the Start date and End date.
8. Select Save.
In the Goals tab, a goal is visible only to its creator.

If a goal is associated with a chart in a dashboard and the dashboard is shared with Everyone, everyone can see the goal in the shared dashboard. This does not change the visibility of the goal in the Goals tab.
Associate a goal with a chart.
You can associate a goal with as many charts in a dashboard as you want. But you can use a goal in only one dashboard. As a consequence, when you duplicate or export a dashboard, any goals that were associated with its charts are lost. Therefore, when you import a dashboard, no goals are imported. However, you can re-create a goal with the same name in a different dashboard because goals are differentiated by their identifiers, not by their names.
For more information about dashboard import, see Working collaboratively with dashboards and charts.

To associate a goal with a chart, proceed as follows.
1. Go to the Dashboards tab and open a dashboard.
2. Create or edit a chart, and then go to the Monitoring tab.
3. Select a goal from the drop-down list under Business context.
4. Select Done.
All the charts that are associated with a same goal are grouped together.

Results

You can also see the underlying charts for a goal from the Goals tab, search for goals by category or name, or filter them by priority. You can also list goals alphabetically or by due date.

You can edit, delete, or duplicate a goal from the overflow menu Chart options local menu

of goal from the list of goals.

Tip: You cannot delete a goal that is associated with some charts in a dashboard. You must first remove the goal from the charts before you can delete it. Alternatively, if a goal is not associated with chart in a dashboard, you can use it in any dashboard you want.

When you delete a dashboard, all associated goals are removed automatically and become available to other dashboards.

What to do next

As further help to monitor your business data, you can also define targets. For instructions, see Defining targets.