Project

Green Office: Sustainability Dashboard

CHALLENGE 

How can we create an insightful and user-friendly sustainability dashboard that combines qualitative and quantitative data?

DESCRIPTION

With increasing concern and the need for progressive solutions that can help organizations and departments to reduce environmental damage, Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) aims to develop a sustainability dashboard. This dashboard should bring together four pillars that is educational, research and facilities and organizational purposes. Although there is already an educational dashboard in PowerBi, it still has challenges in surfacing insights for particular questions. As for the operations and research dashboard under development, the challenge is to find a way in which the qualitative and quantitative data can be merged together for better visualization.

However, narrowing down the challenge, the team will focus on data collection specifically on carbon emissions and reduction related to the ICT department’s hardware and services. Some of the sub-questions that are to be considered include:

  • familiarizing with the already available data.
  • proposing ways that can assist in connecting HvA’s strategic sustainable development pillars.
  • ways to combine impact measurement of qualitative and quantitative data.
  • reconciling impact on both local and central levels.
  • ideating on ways to improve the visualization.

Final Project video

SPRINT 1

Imagine a world where the environment and our technological advancements are in sync and serve the best needs of humans in a sustainable way. Information Communication Tools are fast becoming more preferable as enablers in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. However, there is need to also keep the system in check on how much they contribute to the energy consumption and carbon emissions. Therefore, this project aims to collect the data on the carbon emissions and visualize it through a sustainability dashboard for the policy makers and general end users. In Sprint 1, we set the goals that would help us set the scope for the project and guide us how to move forward.
Conversational objects
Sprint goal and Sub-goals
Results of Sprint 1

Sprint 2

Having identified the data that we needed to collect for the project, in Sprint 2 we had a more narrowed focus on collecting the data for the four key themes we had identified in sprint 1. These themes were a guideline for us to collect data and measure the carbon emissions for the ICT department, and an essential step to determine the metrics that we would work with in accessing data for the rest of the project.
Sprint 2 Goal
Sprint 2 outcome

Sprint 3

During Sprint Three of our project execution phase, we dedicated our efforts to further research on the business tool intended for our dashboard. A comprehensive comparison was conducted between Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. Going forward, we decided to use Power BI as the tool for our dashboard.
Sprint 3 Goal
Sprint 3 Outcomes

Sprint 4

The sprint was more focused on further improvement of the dashboard, refining it further to meet the requirements of the project objectives. The main goal and the sub-goals will be described below.
Sprint Main Goal
Sub Goals
Sprint outcome

Sprint 5

Sprint 5 focused on finalizing the development of a sustainability dashboard for ICT-related CO2 emissions. The primary goal was to complete the dashboard incorporating user testing feedback, real data, and improved visualizations.
Main goal
Sub-goals
Sprint 5 Outcome