DSC 330 Week 1 Gathering Visualization Requirements Example

Asking Before Charting: Gathering Dashboard Requirements for a Nashville Hotel Management Company

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

DSC/330: Data Communication and Visualization for Business

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Music Row Hospitality, its hotels, people and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Music Row Hospitality, a composite company, manages nine hotels in Tennessee and Kentucky for six different owners, from a 340-room downtown Nashville hotel to a 90-room roadside property near Bowling Green. It employs about 1,100 people. Each hotel uses a property management system for reservations and billing, and guest surveys go to an outside firm. Every month, an analyst assembles a 30-page report from exports. The chief operating officer asked for "a dashboard that shows how the hotels are doing." This paper describes how that request was turned into requirements before anything was built.

Why Requirements Come First

Yigitbasioglu and Velcu (2012) reviewed research on dashboards in performance management and concluded that dashboards should fit their purpose, whether monitoring performance, supporting analysis, aiding planning or communicating, and that design features such as level of detail and interactivity should match that purpose and the users' needs. Few (2006) defined a dashboard as one screen that gathers the few figures people need to reach their goals so they can be checked at a glance, and warned that many dashboards fail because they display data without a clear purpose. Pauwels et al. (2009) argued that dashboards add value when they help managers align on a shared set of measures and act on them, which requires agreement on what matters.

Building first and asking later risks a dashboard full of numbers that no one uses. The first step is to learn who will use it and for what.

Identifying Stakeholders

Five groups emerged: the chief operating officer, who oversees all hotels; general managers of each hotel; the regional revenue manager, who sets room prices; the six owners, who receive reports and approve budgets; and department heads, such as housekeeping and front office, who manage daily operations.

Methods

Interviews and the workshop took about two weeks in total, scheduled around each hotel's busiest days. Requirements were gathered through one-hour interviews with the chief operating officer, three general managers, the revenue manager and two owners, a 90-minute workshop with eight department heads from three hotels and a review of the current monthly report, including which pages people said they read. Interview questions asked each person what decisions they make, how often, what information they use now, what frustrates them and what they would do differently with better information.

What Each Group Needs

The chief operating officer wants to compare hotels weekly on revenue per available room, guest satisfaction and labor cost per occupied room, and to spot any hotel slipping below its budget early enough to act.

General managers want daily occupancy, average daily rate and revenue against budget, plus guest complaints by department, so they can address problems in the morning meeting.

The revenue manager wants each hotel's rates and occupancy compared with a set of nearby competitors, updated daily, to adjust prices.

Owners want monthly profit, revenue per available room compared with similar hotels in their market and capital spending against plan. They do not want daily detail.

Department heads want simple counts relevant to their work: rooms cleaned per attendant, complaint topics and staffing against forecast.

The chief operating officer asked for one dashboard; the interviews described at least three.

Data Sources

Mapping needs to data showed what is possible now. Property management systems hold reservations, rates, occupancy and revenue. The guest survey firm provides satisfaction scores and comments weekly. Labor hours come from the payroll system. Competitor rates and occupancy come from a market data subscription the revenue manager already uses. Owners' profit figures come from the accounting system monthly. Complaint categories are inconsistent across hotels; two hotels log complaints in a notebook.

Constraints

The company uses a business intelligence tool already licensed for the accounting team. Data from property management systems can be exported nightly; survey data arrive weekly. Owners must see only their own hotels, which requires secure, role-based views. General managers check information on phones before morning meetings, so their view must work on small screens.

Priorities

In a follow-up session, stakeholders ranked requirements by value and feasibility. First priority: a weekly portfolio view for the chief operating officer and a daily hotel view for general managers, since data for both exist. Second: an owner's monthly view with market comparisons. Third: department head views and consistent complaint logging, which requires changing how two hotels record complaints.

Requirements Statement

The first release will provide two views. The portfolio view shows, for each hotel, weekly revenue per available room, guest satisfaction score and labor cost per occupied room against budget and last year, with hotels below target highlighted. The hotel view shows daily occupancy, average daily rate and revenue against budget, plus guest complaints by department for the past seven days, and works on a phone. Data refresh nightly; satisfaction refreshes weekly. Access is role-based.

What the Old Report Taught

Reviewing the current 30-page monthly report was revealing. General managers said they read only the first two pages, which show their hotel's revenue against budget. Owners said the report arrived too late, about three weeks after month end, to discuss with their own investors. The revenue manager did not use it at all, relying on her own spreadsheets. Several pages, such as a breakdown of minibar sales, had been added years ago at someone's request and never removed. The review confirmed that more information was not the goal; the right information at the right time was.

Confirming With Users

The draft requirements were sent by email to each interviewee, and a 30-minute review meeting confirmed them with two changes: general managers asked for a seven-day trend rather than a single day, and the chief operating officer added a flag for hotels with falling satisfaction three weeks in a row.

Conclusion

A vague request for "a dashboard that shows how the hotels are doing" became specific requirements after interviews, a workshop and a review of current reports. Different users need different views, data sources and constraints shape what can be built first and confirmed priorities give Week 2's chart choices a clear direction.

References

Few, S. (2006). Information dashboard design: The effective visual communication of data. O'Reilly Media.

Pauwels, K., Ambler, T., Clark, B. H., LaPointe, P., Reibstein, D., Skiera, B., Wierenga, B., & Wiesel, T. (2009). Dashboards as a service: Why, what, how, and what research is needed? Journal of Service Research, 12(2), 175-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670509344213

Yigitbasioglu, O. M., & Velcu, O. (2012). A review of dashboards in performance management: Implications for design and research. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 13(1), 41-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accinf.2011.08.002