Tableau Behind the Scenes: New Dashboard Updates Reflect Team Principles

“Nearly everyone in OIT needs some sort of access to information in the Tableau dashboards,” says Teresa Proctor, Director of Implementation and Reporting for ISPG.

Tableau dashboards are used by ISSOs, program managers, and other data management professionals across CMS to view snapshots of the overall health of CMS systems and to identify, understand, and track system vulnerabilities and risk.

Using an Agile methodology, ISPG’s Reporting and Data Integration (RDI) team recently updated the Tableau dashboards to provide a more user-centric, actionable, and accessible experience. The updates reflect their commitment to certain team principles, including communication and collaboration, change and innovation, and data transparency.

Communication and Collaboration

In January, the Tableau dashboards showed a sudden influx of 1.2 million critical vulnerabilities. Through a collaboration of subject matter experts and users, CMS was able to reduce those vulnerabilities by 92% within the required timeframe. On a granular level, that means RDI engages ISSOs like Derek Bailey, who works on the Enterprise Privacy Policy Engine and data.cms.gov. Bailey keeps RDI informed of any issues in the dashboards and suggests improvements when needed. If the dashboards reveal any problems, Derek follows up with his team to mitigate vulnerabilities. 

“This shows that community engagement and people understanding what they’re doing, how to do it, and how it feeds into the bigger picture is paying off,” Proctor says.

RDI employed a human-centered design approach to create a more user-friendly dashboard. Allison Schiller, Human-Centered Design Specialist, conducted interviews and focus groups and sat in on meetings to understand how the dashboards could evolve to meet user needs.

“Most of the work I do is to understand what the dashboards are supposed to be accomplishing, who the users are, and how they’re using them so that they continue to be user-centered,” Schiller says.

Dashboard users walked Schiller through their work. She gathered data on the questions they had and the barriers they experienced. RDI then used these insights to integrate new data and features.

The RDI team also hosts demos and training sessions. Christopher David, Program and Project Manager for ISPG’s Security, Privacy Awareness & Training Team, designed Dashboard Jeopardy (pictured below) to create a fun and engaging learning experience.

“This approach takes a human-centered design concept and brings it into the field. The education and training of our user base is really important to us. You can create the most beautiful dashboards in the world, but if people don't know how to use them, you can forget it. It's not going to work,” David says.

Change and Innovation

Changing the dashboards in ways that work for the user community is an ongoing effort. Community needs and priorities can quickly shift, but RDI embraces new ways to be efficient, collaborate, and problem-solve.

“You don't see that in every type of team, so I've really appreciated the openness to change and growth,” David says.

Innovation often follows an openness to change. RDI now uses robotic process automation (RPA) to scan for dashboard anomalies or malfunctions. In the past, RDI manually reviewed each dashboard using a long checklist. Now, RPA automatically checks each dashboard by 7:30 every morning, providing the team with advanced warnings of any issues with the dashboard functions. When users log in to start their day, they know right away what to expect.