Operational Dashboards Every AEC Leadership Team Should Have

Imagine a world where you don’t need to check four different platforms to get an answer to a project question. Most leadership teams still make decisions based on fragmented reports, spreadsheets, and lagging indicators.

Below are the dashboards and information Arvaya strongly recommends to improve decision making + visibility for AEC leadership. Not only do we recommend having these, but having these dashboards pull data from all platforms that your organization uses is crucial to stay up to date. And if you really want to strike gold, we recommend personalized team and employee training on each dashboard.

As you read through, ask yourself what your dashboards show + what you wish they showed…

1. Revenue Pipeline Dashboard to show visibility into future revenue and business development performance.

What it should include:

• Active pursuits by stage (identified → qualified → pursuit → proposal submitted → shortlisted → awarded)

• Proposal pipeline by sector, client, and contract type (public vs private, on-call vs project specific)

• Win rate by opportunity type (RFP, RFQ, sole source, repeat client)

• Estimated contract start timelines tied to backlog forecasting

• Top pursuits requiring executive involvement

• Relationship strength with client decision makers (warm lead vs incumbent vs cold pursuit)

In practice: We recently rebuilt a CRM system for an AEC firm that previously tracked pursuits across spreadsheets and disconnected tools. By restructuring the CRM and building pipeline dashboards, leadership gained visibility into active pursuits, proposal timelines, and sector level pipeline health.

The value? Helps leadership forecast revenue, identify pipeline gaps, and allocate BD resources strategically.

2. Project Performance Dashboard to show real time visibility into project execution and firm profitability.

What it should include:

• Project budget vs actuals

• Billable vs non billable hours by employee, discipline, and project

• Schedule progress

• Project schedule health (milestones met, delays, upcoming deadlines)

The value? Allows leadership to quickly identify projects that are drifting off budget or schedule before they become major issues.

3. Operational Capacity Dashboard to help teams understand capacity and resource allocation.

What it should include:

• Billable utilization by discipline and team (design, engineering, field, PM)

• Available capacity vs committed project hours

• Upcoming staffing demand based on project schedules and pursuits

The value? Helps leadership balance workloads, prevent burnout, and staff projects more effectively.

In our opinion, what creates effective dashboards is how systems are structured behind them. When CRM, ERP, project systems, and operational data are integrated correctly, dashboards become a real time decision layer for leadership.

True success in systems involves team training + dashboards that are structured for how your organization actually operates, not just layered on top of what is not working. 

We would love to hear how your firm is thinking about dashboards. Do you have all of this data in one spot? Let us know in the comments!