Before building any report, it is important to ask yourself the following questions:
Also, remember that Analytics is INCREDIBLY useful, but it will only ever be as useful as your data collection methods. If staff are not keying in proper information for Leads, Contacts, Deals, Accounts, or other custom modules, any data you display will be very misleading and, ultimately, undermine any decisions made from the information provided in your data. This is why it is SO important to make sure that processes surrounding record creation, record updates, sales pipeline management, etc. are dialed in first so that you can trust the information that you have at your fingertips.
Always keep smart visualization in mind. Colors, shape, size, etc. will have a massive impact on the way your dashboards will be received or understood (e.g. if you are creating a scatter-plot which displays categorical data, it would be smarter to differentiate that data by Color rather than Shape as colors pop out to our eyes more easily than shapes do allowing users to find what they need easier more quickly). The WAY you present something is, arguably, just as important as WHAT you are presenting.
Project Details:
You are to build two dashboards from your CRM data:
The Executive dashboard is meant to display information regarding business processes, fiscal goals & progress, employee performance, etc. (obviously some of the reports are a bit silly like birthday analytics, but these are to help familiarize you with the report builders and filters)
The Data Integrity Dashboard is meant to display information regarding data gaps which currently exist or lapses in data collection.