A discussion of dashboard implementation methodology highlights the importance of the planning phase, requirements gathering and prototype, design, build/validate, deployment, maintenance, and build versus buy. In the planning stage, members of a team have to keep in mind the needs of executives and line-of-business users, who often are not included on the team, but are the primary dashboard users. The scope of the project has to be determined, including key performance indicators (KPIs). When the plan is complete, discussions begin on options available for dashboard presentation and functionality. Personal preferences should be determined, and for each dashboard the desired data elements are identified. When requirements for content and appearance are agreed upon, primary aspects of the design have to be finished, including refinement of user interface and control flow, conformation of data sources for each element, determination of the way in which data will be made to persist when historical trending information is needed, definition of queries required to retrieve each data element, and determination of drill paths. Build-and-validate requirements are described in terms of front-end and query implementation, configuration of scheduling, refresh, and security, and dashboard validation testing. Security requirements must be met in the production environment, and the dashboard solution should be sufficiently flexible and open to permit enhancement requests.