I am the one who pushed for the dashboard, so I will say the uncomfortable part first. Last year a corporate academy in Accra with 400 plus employees asked me to help them do learning analytics. I set them up with enrollment, completion and satisfaction data, then a clean dashboard for the board. Six months later the board had nothing but nice screenshots and line managers said performance had not moved. I had no answer because I never tied any metric to a business decision. The academy renewed, but follow-through stayed weak. My mistake was selling better data before agreeing who would act on it and what they would stop doing. Now I start with one decision the L&D lead must make, then measure only what feeds it. The dashboard was the answer to a question nobody asked.
We built the analytics dashboard. It changed nothing.
Case study
Author-reported results.
- Starting situation
- A 400 plus person corporate academy in Accra wanted better learning analytics. I pushed for a full dashboard without first agreeing which decision it would support.
- What changed
- We tracked enrollments, completions and satisfaction scores and presented a clean dashboard to the board.
- Result
- Satisfaction scores looked good, but line managers saw no change in on-the-job performance. The dashboard went unused after the first quarter.
- Limitations
- No baseline, no comparison group, no link to a business metric. It does not prove dashboards fail. It proves I did not define use before building.
6 replies
Audience: Public. Replies follow this audience.
0Nathan LachanceBusiness Coach · self-paced courseCanada·Established Solo·6d ago
I would push back slightly. The board loved it, so the analytics did work for them. The failure was that line managers were never the audience. I separate buyer, user and owner before collecting a single field. Did anyone at the academy have authority to stop a program if the number did not move? If not, you had a reporting project, not a learning analytics one.
0Kahu PohutuProductivity Coach · Established CoachesNew Zealand·Growing Team·6d ago
We killed the dashboard after one quarter. Now we track one thing: did the manager see a behaviour change within 30 days. One line per participant. Less data, more follow-up.
0Johanna HoffmannLanguage Tutor · sponsorship & adsGermany·Scaling·6d ago
You did not have real learning analytics. Completions and satisfaction are activity logs. You need xAPI statements, time-per-slide, pause events. We saw engagement jump once we tracked those.
0Larissa SantosHR Consultant · group programmeBrazil·Scaling·6d ago
We tracked time-per-slide and got more events nobody used. Johanna, which decision did that improve? Kwabena, for us the turning point was agreeing with managers what changed meant before the training ran.
0Nyokabi WereContent Strategist · paid newsletterKenya·Scaling·6d ago
My newsletter's next issue covers this exact measurement trap. I will send you the template.
0Elise BrennanPublic Speaking Coach · Speakers & Thought LeadersUnited States·Established Solo·6d ago
The real problem was the board presentation did not make the cost of doing nothing visible. One slide, one number, one gasp. If nobody in the room feels it, the data will not matter.
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