Meeting Room Bottlenecks Dashboard

Purpose

When it comes to analyzing meeting rooms, the first step is identifying problems and success criteria. This dashboard serves to do both.

Typically, the most important issue with meeting rooms is ‘Are there rooms to book?'. Worded differently - do we have too many, too few, or just the right number of rooms. This can lead to secondary questions like ‘are staff booking appropriate rooms’, ‘are bookings attended’ or ‘who is using meeting rooms’, however, those secondary questions are not the focus of this dashboard.

This can be used to answer specific questions. For example ‘Do we have enough 4 seat rooms?’:

If you have no bottlenecks with 4 seat rooms, staff could always book a 4 seat room. This means you likely have more 4 seat rooms the necessary.
If you have many bottlenecks with 4 seat rooms, staff will struggle to book one when they need them. This can lead to secondary problems, for example, staff booking higher seat rooms despite not needing that many seats. This is an indication of too few 4 seat rooms.
If you have a few bottlenecks, but they are not constant, this is a sign of a good balance. All rooms are being used, but more often than not, staff can find a 4 seat room when they need them.

Bottlenecks make a good success criteria for changes. If new business rules for staff are implemented, changes in bottlenecks can be used to measure the success of those changes. This dashboard is ideal for that case as it shows bottlenecks over time, by weekday, by the hour with specific callouts to high-bottleneck days and hours.

Special Data Elements

A bottleneck is defined as ‘An instance of time in which all rooms of a particular category, in a particular location, are all booked’. The idea is - if all rooms are booked, then there is a bottleneck as no more rooms can be booked. This dashboard uses the time windows of 1 hour, the location as 1 floor, and the category as Seats, range of Seats or Space Type.
Importantly - a bottleneck in 1 category does not mean a bottleneck in a different category in the same day. For example, if all 4 seat rooms are bottlenecked in a given hour, it does not necessarily mean 4-7 seat rooms bottlenecked in that same hour.

Special Filters

N/A

Limitations

This dashboard only uses seat and space types as dimensions. It does not combine these (so no ‘Are all Conference Rooms with 4 seats bottlenecked’). An advanced version of this dashboard that provides for significantly more flexibility is planned.