Efficiency Dashboards overview

With Efficiency Dashboards in Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP), you can build custom dashboards to find bottlenecks and track team performance. These dashboards can help you answer questions about your team's performance as they complete tasks, both for internal improvement and external stakeholder management. You can view tasks by status, track completion rates, and measure lead times. These insights let you see what is stuck, how much content is flowing, and whether your team is meeting deadlines.

Use these dashboards to answer questions like the following:

• Where is your team getting stuck in a workflow?
• How much content has the team produced for an audience or channel?
• How long does it take the team to make a banner ad or blog post?

Efficiency Dashboards contains two parts: dashboards that you can create for data stories and cards that answer key questions. You can configure each card to answer questions by grouping or filtering information. For example, you can create cards that answer how long it took your team to produce a blog post in Campaign A in Q1 2025. 

You can use Efficiency Dashboards with the following card types:

• Tasks by Status – Visualize a set of tasks by their status. For example, Show me the status of all the blog post tasks in our Back-To-School Campaign or Show me the status of all of the tasks in the month of May.
• Tasks Completed – Visualize a set of tasks that are completed. For example, Show me all the tasks that we completed in Q1 2024 or Show me all the landing pages we launched in the EMEA region in 2024.
• Step Lead Time – Visualize what steps slow down your workflows.
• Task On-Time Performance – Visualize a set of tasks by the percent (%) of time they are completed by their due date. For example, How often are our NA tasks completed on time? or How often are we on time for 2025?
• Task Lead Time – Visualize the average time to complete tasks or content. For example, Show me how long white paper tasks stay open in the system on average or Show me how long Bob's tasks stay open on average.
• Campaigns by Status – Visualize campaign performance by status.
• Campaign Lead Time – Visualize how long campaigns take to complete.
• Work Requests by Status – Visualize workflow trends by request status.

Understanding Lead Time metrics

The Step Lead Time, Task Lead Time, and Campaign Lead Time cards each measure elapsed time differently. Use the details below to interpret each figure accurately.

Step Lead Time

The Step Lead Time card displays the average time each step takes to complete within a workflow. Use it to compare steps, spot which ones take longest, and identify bottlenecks across your active campaigns.

How lead time is calculated

• Lead time is measured from step completions in the order they were actually completed, not the order defined in the workflow. This accounts for flexible workflows, where steps can be completed in any sequence.
• For each task, CMP orders the completed steps by their completed date. A step's lead time is the interval between its completion and the completion immediately before it.
• Step intervals are rounded down to whole days, so a step completed 23 hours after the previous one shows a lead time of 0 days.
• The first completed step in a task has no preceding completion, so its lead time is measured from the task's start date.
• Across all tasks that use the same workflow, every instance of a given step is averaged together to produce the value on the card.

For example, if a step took 2, 5, and 14 days to complete across three tasks, the card displays an average lead time of 7 days for that step.

Fixed and flexible workflows

In fixed (sequential) workflows, steps complete in a predictable order, so lead time reflects the time spent on each step as expected. In flexible workflows, a step can be worked on early or alongside others. Because lead time is measured by completion order rather than actual start time, the value for a step may not reflect how long it was genuinely worked on. 

Task Lead Time

The Task Lead Time card shows the average time each task takes to complete, end to end. Use it to compare tasks and spot those running longer than expected.

How lead time is calculated

Lead time is the interval between two dates, both set automatically by CMP:

• Actual start – the date the first step in the task moves to In Progress. This is not the same as the planned start date set when the task is created.
• Completed – the date all steps in the task are finished.

A task's lead time is the difference in calendar days between the two (completed date minus actual start date). For example, if a task's actual start was July 22 at 5:00 PM and its completed date was July 23 at 5:00 AM, the lead time is one day, even though only 12 hours elapsed. Because lead time uses the difference in calendar dates, any change from one date to the next counts as a full day.

Across all tasks shown, each task's lead time is averaged together. For example, if three tasks took 2, 8, and 20 days from actual start to completion, the card displays an average of 10 days.

Actual start and planned start

The actual start is when work genuinely began, the moment the first step moved to In Progress, not the planned start date a user may enter when creating the task. These can differ. Because lead time is measured as elapsed calendar time, it includes any waiting or idle time between start and completion, not only active working time.

Campaign Lead Time

The Campaign Lead Time card shows the average number of days taken to complete a campaign. For each campaign, lead time is the difference in calendar days between its Start Date and its Completed Date, averaged across all completed campaigns in the selected group.

• Start Date – Set on the Create New Campaign page. If left blank, it defaults to the date the campaign is created. You can view and edit it any time from the campaign's details.

• Completed Date – Set automatically by the system. There is no Mark as complete action. CMP stamps the date and time the moment a campaign qualifies as finished. A campaign qualifies when all of the following are true at once:

  • The campaign's End Date is in the past.
  • The campaign contains at least one task step (empty campaigns cannot be completed).
  • Every task step is finished, with nothing due or outstanding.

The system re-checks these conditions whenever work in the campaign changes (a step is finished, reopened, added, or moved) and on a regular background schedule. If a completed campaign no longer qualifies, for example, its End Date is moved to the future, or a step is reopened or added. The Completed Date is cleared and the campaign is treated as reopened.

View underlying records

You can view the CMP records behind a card to investigate results and take action. To view the records, complete the following:

1. Click More (...) > View Records on a card (available when the card has data). 
   
2. View the dialog that opens with a table of the records that make up the chart, including:
   • The record Title, linked to the task, campaign, or work request in CMP.
   • The card's status, owner, step, or assignee, based on the card type.  
   • Relevant dates for the card type, such as started, completed, or due dates.
     
3. Click Download as CSV to export the records for further analysis in tools like Excel, Power BI, or Tableau. See Create cards and Create a dashboard for information.