Safety committees meet on different rhythms. A monthly committee reviewing corrective actions needs month-bound panels with action due dates overlaid. A weekly toolbox group needs shift strips that show whether incidents cluster around changeovers.
We ask three scoping questions before selecting granularity: how often the committee can act on new data, how stable the reporting cadence is, and whether seasonality affects the process being measured.
Shift-based charts require consistent shift labels in the logs. If operators use informal names, we run a half-day alignment session before charting. Otherwise the panels imply false precision.
When incident volume is low, we widen the time window and add commentary boxes instead of empty chart segments. Committees prefer an honest gap marker to a smoothed interpolation.
Granularity decisions are documented in the atlas introduction so future analysts know why March was shown by week while the prior year appears by month.