From meme to masterpiece: crafting a business intelligence dashboard

Have you ever become a living meme in pursuit of a new skill? I have, courtesy of a business intelligence visualisation assignment supervised by the ever-supportive Professor Rudi O’Reilly Meehan.

The brief seemed straightforward: build a Tableau dashboard from two academic years (2024–2026) of a school’s admissions CRM data, giving trustees and management actionable insight into lead progression, task efficiency and marketing effectiveness. Simple, right?

Not quite.

A Sankey nightmare

Ambitiously, I decided a Sankey chart would be perfect for showing lead journeys and drop-offs. How hard could it be?

Very, as it turns out. Tableau crashed, Excel froze and my coffee machine worked overtime. Each failed attempt made the complexity clearer. Eventually, overwhelmed, I went to Professor Rudi for help. He heard me out, smiled and said something I’ll never forget:

“Shashank, it’s completely okay even if you don’t manage this chart. You’re still learning, and frankly, you’re already doing great. Though right now you do look exactly like this meme,” pointing to the infamous conspiracy-theory meme pinned on his screen.

We laughed. But I knew I couldn’t back down.

The breakthrough

Persistence paid off. Splitting the original CSV into three datasets (master, stages and tasks) was the breakthrough, and it let me calculate new metrics:

• Enquiry age: time from enquiry creation to last interaction
• Average task completion time: a measure of CRM efficiency
• Effective stage: tracking how far each lead had progressed

I also visualised marketing effectiveness by calculating cost per lead and conversion rate, which added real strategic value.

After many attempts, the Sankey chart finally appeared, clear and informative, and it revealed the crucial drop-offs at the “Application received” and “Observation” stages.

The final dashboard

• A clear view of task completion and overdue work
• Detailed insight into marketing channel effectiveness
• Strategic recommendations for optimising future admissions

Reflections

The project taught me about persistence, the iterative nature of visualisation, and embracing challenges, even if it means becoming a meme for a while.

My thanks to Professor Rudi O’Reilly Meehan, whose reassurance and humour made an intense process enjoyable and deeply educational. Sometimes becoming a meme is the first step towards a masterpiece.