Executives stopped using the dashboards. They didn’t trust the data. Here’s how we rebuilt trust in 10 weeks.
The client called it a “dashboard problem.” It wasn’t. The dashboards worked fine. The numbers on them were wrong often enough that leadership stopped believing any of them.
No validation on source data. No tests on transformations. No ownership. Silent failures that nobody caught until a board meeting went sideways.
We built the quality framework in layers.
Weeks 1-3: Source-layer tests. Schema validation, completeness checks, freshness monitoring. Caught 40+ silent failures in the first week alone.
Weeks 4-6: Staging-layer tests. Business logic validation, transformation checks. This is where most of the wrong numbers lived.
Weeks 7-8: Output-layer tests. Critical metric cross-checks, dashboard-specific validation.
Weeks 9-10: Monitoring, alerting, and documented data quality SLAs per domain owner.
The turning point wasn’t technical. It was the weekly quality report we started sending to leadership. They could see things improving. Transparency rebuilt what silence had broken.
Three months later, the CEO was back in the dashboards daily.
Do your executives actually trust the numbers on your dashboards?