Share:

The world loves Stephen Few’s bullet graph. It’s small, concise and speaks volumes about the comparison between current performance and targeted performance. It’s a prodigious improvement on dashboard gauges. In constructing a bullet graph, however, you have options. Here’s the one I recommend…

Stephen Few’s recommended features of a bullet graph are important for the graph to be meaningful. Let’s do a quick review of them here, but you can get the detail in his beautiful book, Information Dashboard Design.

image courtesy of Stephen Few

The anatomy of a basic bullet graph

Firstly, the solid black bar represents your performance measure’s current value.

Secondly, the grey shaded areas depict qualitative ranges of performance. The lighter the shade, the better performance is. So the shaded range that the end of the measure value bar stops in will represent how good or bad performance is right now.

Thirdly, the small black vertical bar or marker, residing in the lightest grey range, is the value of a comparative measure. This usually is the measure’s target.

Here’s a caveat: this basic bullet graph design requires that your measure’s scale starts from zero. This way, the length of the bar in the bullet graph will represent the size of your measure’s value. It also makes sure that the distance between your measure’s value and the target, the symbol marker that encodes the comparative measure, is proportionally correct. That means that you can see how far current performance is from where you want it to be.

Now, Stephen was not particularly prescriptive about exactly how you decide what values the bar and the shaded ranges should be based on. But I am!

I want to give you a prescription, because most people will use the measure’s current month value for the bar, and set arbitrary ranges for the shading. This is not a robust way to assess performance, because it ignores natural variability in the measure’s values. Here is a better way…

A prescription for how to decide what values to use to build your bullet graph

Here is Stephen Few’s bullet graph anatomy diagram again, but this time with my prescription for how to build it:

Firstly, the solid black bar encodes the performance measure’s current Central Line value from its XmR chart. If you use the current week’s or month’s value for the measure, you have no idea how much natural variability the measure has, and therefore you don’t get an accurate idea of how far current performance is from the target.

Secondly, the grey shaded areas encode interim targets for the measure’s Central Line. The boundaries between each shaded area are the interim target values. The shaded range that the end of the measure’s bar stops in will indicate that performance has achieved an interim target. I like interim targets, because they help dissolve the debate about whether a target should be stretch, achievable, believable, whatever.

Thirdly, the small black vertical bar or marker is the stretch (or ultimate) target for the measure. This is the level your want your measure’s Central Line – or overall average level of performance – to reach. It doesn’t have to be a stretch target, but you know that once your measure has achieved it, you can turn your attention to other measures that are still progressing toward theirs.

Use these ‘PuMPed’ bullet graphs along with smartlines (or process behaviour sparklines, as Stephen calls them in his book), and you have a very concise, space-saving way to quickly monitor your performance measures.

Special thanks to Stephen Few for his permission to use and his assistance in creating these bullet graph images.

DISCUSSION:

Have you used bullet graphs in your performance dashboards? How have you defined the measure value, qualitative ranges, and comparator?

1. Katrina says:

   August 5, 2014 at 10:44 am

   This looks great Stacey. I think this will be really useful in our organisation.

   Reply
   • Stacey Barr says:

     August 5, 2014 at 4:25 pm

     Hi Katrina! Hey, if you go ahead and use these, let me know. You could be another little PuMP case study!

     Reply
2. Tom Griffin says:

   August 6, 2014 at 12:52 am

   Greetings, I, as usual, am a bit at sea over the pumped graph. Is the sold black line is described as the central line and the grey zones are described as the interum targets. This assumes that the central line will be recomputed monthly instead of when the XmR indicates that a changes has taken place to require changing the natural limits. Is this a goal graph and the XmR the nartural chart? Your thoughts appreciated and thank you for keeping us PuMPed up.

   Reply
   • Stacey Barr says:

     August 6, 2014 at 8:41 am

     Hi Tom,

     No, the PuMPed bullet graph doesn’t assume the central line is recalculated monthly. It’s only recalculated when a signal requires it to be. So if there are no signals, the bullet graph won’t change from month to month. The whole idea is to stop knee-jerk reacting to a single month’s data (or week’s or quarter’s). I accompany these PuMPed bullet graphs with smartlines. While the smartlines don’t have a zero baseline (they maximise the size of the data range so it’s easier to see signals), the bullet graph does have a zero baseline. This means that the smartline shows signals, and the bullet graph shows how far current performance is from its targets.

     Reply
3. Raj Subramaniam says:

   August 6, 2014 at 1:07 pm

   Hi Stacy,

   Would like to get your thoughts on the new crop of measures around customer perception (via the web and social media)… rapidly popularized by the free Google Analytics tool

   The top management’s focus will shift to this in the near future as it is all about customer perception… “outside-in” measures as opposed to ‘inside-out’ measures
   The alignment of measures to the strategy will become less relevant… and the organization will be designed to be flexible and adapt to customer perceptions and changes… based on moment of truth (MOT)… and sets MOT’s will be the new sections/departments/functions… your thoughts please

   PS. I will be joining you for the Melbourne workshop this month

   My regards,
   Raj

   Reply