As explained earlier, a PPS Dashboard is a container for displaying reports and scorecards, organized in a meaningful way that makes sense to business users and decision-makers. Hence the creation of a dashboard effectively involves planning and creating individual dashboard elements (that is, reports and scorecards) and deploying the dashboard to SharePoint.
At a higher level, to create a PPS dashboard, you need to perform the following tasks, in this sequence:
1. Create a new data source; say, pointing to the Adventure Works cube.
2. Create one or more scorecards and/or reports.
3. Create a dashboard and add the scorecards and reports to it.
4. Deploy the dashboard to SharePoint.
The Try It Yourself section next explores these steps further, by creating a dashboard based on the Adventure Works cube deployed earlier.
Next have a look at a new feature in SharePoint 2010 called decomposition tree. A decomposition tree provides an interactive way to explore hierarchies and contribution relationships. For example, right-click any bar in the analytic chart and select the Decomposition Tree option, as shown in Figure 23.22.
This brings up a new dialog window with an arrangement of horizontal bar charts, as shown in Figure 23.23. You can click the + symbol next to any of the bars to further drill down to the next level interactively or perform root cause analysis.