Dynamics CRM 2011 Goal Management Charts

Goal Management Backgrounder

Goal management is one of the most important new features in Dynamics CRM 2011. In a nutshell, as long as you can express a goal in terms of information stored in Dynamics CRM records, you can use goal management to do things like the following:

• Define target values to track progress against
• Track actual and in-progress values against the target value
• Assign goals to users or teams, and have all of the records they own roll up to the actual and in-progress values
• Specify criteria records must meet to roll up to a goal (e.g., establish and track goals for territories, product lines and the like)
• Define parent and child goals, with child goals rolling up to parent goals (e.g., define individual goals for sales representatives, and define a parent goal for the entire sales team, with each of the individual goals rolling up to the sales team goal.)

And it’s important to understand that goal management can work for anything…provided it can be expressed in one of the two following ways:

1. As the sum of numeric field. An example of this is a sales goal, specified as the sum of the “Est. Revenue” field for opportunity records for a specific time period.
2. As a record count. An example of this is a goal for qualified leads, specified as the number of lead records closed with a status of “Qualified” for a specific time period.

This article is NOT going to be a comprehensive treatment of goal management – rather what I want to do here is drill down on a specific aspect of goal management, namely the out of the box charts you will see in the chart pane for goals. I found these confusing at first, but figuring them out gave me more insight into goal management generally, so I thought it would be worth an article dedicated to understanding and working with the goal management charts.

[Here's an early article I wrote on the general topic of goal management, Goal-Oriented CRM in Dynamics CRM 2011]

Scenario

I’ll use a simple goal management scenario to illustrate. Using the sample Adventure Works database, I’ve created two sets of goals.

One is for monthly sales goals defined against the opportunity record type, and I’ve created monthly goals for January and February:

The other is for qualified leads, and I’ve created goal records for the same two periods:

Even at this point you can see something importantly different about these two sets of goals: the revenue goal is defined as the sum of field values, while the lead goal is a record count goal. In a minute you’ll see why this is important when working with the goal charts.

If you haven’t worked with goal management yet, here’s a quick summary of how it works:

Goal records – like the ones you see above – are always based on a Goal Metric. The goal metric specifies the underlying record type, whether it’s a field sum or a record count, which field to sum and how changes in status values contribute to the Actual and In-Progress fields in the goal records.

Goal records have a Target Value field that is manually entered. They also have Actual and In-Progress fields that are calculated fields (by default, automatically every 24 hours, but you can manually recalculate them at any time.)

Understanding Goal Charts

Obviously, there’s a lot going on with goals, which makes a good understanding of the available charts even more important than with other record types. Continuing my “leads & sales” goals scenario, here’s a screenshot of the goals data grid with the My Goals for This Period view selected. (The current “fiscal period” in this organization is Q1, which explains why both January and February goal records are included in “This Period” views)

Figure 1: The “My Goals for This Period” View

This looks reasonable, but when I expand the chart pane with this view selected, the default Goal Progress (Money) chart looks like this:

Yikes: Even if I knew what all those data points indicated I wouldn’t be sure what to make of this! If I select a different chart, it doesn’t improve much but it provides a clue about what’s going on. Here’s the Goal Progress (Count) chart:

To understand how these goal charts work, consider this:

Most of the charts available by default in Dynamics CRM 2011 display aggregates (sums or record counts, usually) grouped by various categories. The Sales Pipeline chart of opportunities is a good example: the sales funnel is grouped by the Pipeline Phase field, with each group representing the sum of the Est. Revenue field for all open opportunities in that phase. You could have 10,000 open opportunities, but if you’ve only got five values for pipeline phase, the chart will only display five funnel pieces:

That is NOT how the goal charts work! There are five available out of the box, and they are all designed to display a data point for every row in whatever view is currently selected on the goals data grid. That’s why, once you start figuring out how useful goals can be and start creating a bunch of them — for all kinds of different record types — a view such as Active Goals will almost never be useful for visualizing:

What the heck is that supposed to tell us???

So in order to make sense of the goal charts, the trick is to create views that only contain goal records based on the same “metric type” (Count or Amount, remember, defined in the underlying goal metric record). The next two figures stick to this rule, and start to illustrate how useful these goal charts can be.

Here, rather than the four records displayed in the view in Figure 1, I’ve created a more specific view, this one only containing the two monthly revenue goals. And since these are “Amount” goals rolling up a money field, I’ve selected the Goal Progress (Money) chart in the chart pane:

And in the following figure, I’ve selected a view displaying only the two lead goal records, and paired it with a lovely Goal Progress (Count) chart:

OK, now we’re getting somewhere. If we can only figure out what all those symbols mean! I’ll explain them here, with reference to the Goal Progress (Money) chart, although the concepts are the same whether for a money or a count chart.

A few paragraphs back I said that the goal charts all display a data point for each record in the currently selected view. This isn’t actually true: they display multiple data points for each record in the view, but I didn’t want to freak you out too early in the article, so I held back a little. The goal progress charts display four data points for each goal record:

1. The sum of the Actual Revenue field for Won opportunities is displayed as the green Actual bar.
2. The sum of the Est. Revenue field for Open opportunities is displayed as the gray In-progress bar stacked on top of the Actual.
3. The Target value is displayed as the blue circle “target” icon.
4. Finally, the small black triangle is the value of Today’s Target. The Today’s Target value is the value you would need to have achieved as of today to be “on target” for the time period. In this example, I’ve got a $200,000 revenue target for January. January has 31 days and today is the 23^rd, so I multiply $200,000 by (23/31), come up with $148,387, and sure enough, that’s what Dynamics CRM calculated as the Today’s Target value!

By the way, I wouldn’t take that Today’s Target concept too literally. For example, the reason that today’s target for the Feb. sales goal is $0 is that we aren’t in February yet. I wouldn’t want my sales team thinking it’s a good idea to start a month with $0 in closed opportunities just because the Today’s Target value for all future months is zero! J

The Rest of the Out of the Box Goal Management Charts

We’ve come this far so we might as well have a look at the rest of the goal charts. You can see all five of them here:

And really, there’s only three:

1. Both flavors of the Goal Progress charts are the same; the only difference is the units – Count or Money.
2. Same with the Today’s Target Vs. Actuals charts: they’re the same apart from the units. The previous figure shows the Today’s Target Vs. Actuals (Money) for my little scenario, and you can eyeball it to see that this is just a simpler version of the Goal Progress chart: it just drops the In-Progress and Target values, to get a less cluttered visual comparison of where I am today Vs. where I should be today.
3. The Percentage Achieved chart is like the Today’s Target Vs. Actuals charts, except that it replaces the Actual value with the Percent Achieved value.

Creating Custom Goal Management Charts

You can create custom charts for the goal record type…but you cannot use the built-in Dynamics CRM Chart Designer to build the kinds of charts I’ve discussed in this article! I found this confusing at first, until I learned that this is a limitation of the Chart Designer tool – not of the visualization/charting engine. The issue is that the Chart Designer cannot create charts with multiple “group by” attributes, such as these goal management charts contain. (There are some other examples of the kinds of charts you cannot create with the Chart Designer in the opportunity chart pane: Deals Won Vs. Deals Lost, Estimated Vs. Actual Revenue).

The visualization engine in Dynamics CRM 2011 supports ASP.NET charts, and what this means is you can potentially display lots of fancy charts for goals or any other record type, provided you can externally create and them import a properly formatted XML chart definition file.

Fortunately you don’t have to start from scratch. With any chart selected, click on the Charts tab and then click Export Chart. Save the XML file to disk, modify it, and then import it back in when you’re done.

That’s an important topic, but too big to tack on here. I’ll definitely write an article on the topic before too long, and it’s also a topic I cover in my Dynamics CRM 2011 Essentials training, now available as a monthly series of four-hour training sessions you can subscribe to.