The Almighty Report

Employees from across industries and domains frown when their managers ask them for a report. Reporting, in the eyes of many, is not a productive activity. Nonetheless, every organization maintains a fleet of reporting / MIS analyst, Business analysts, BI tools etc.  For most companies the reporting and analytics fleet will remain an overhead unless the core business of the company is analytics, BI or reporting.

Despite its auxiliary nature, reports are very powerful. They help those at the helm to call the shots which can make or break the future of a company, and those associated with it. People providing reports are always the first to see information, like a sailor atop the mast. The reporting team will have the results of a company even before the CFO sees it. In many companies, members of the reporting team are prohibited from trading in shares. And the power of these reports puts its creators in a very responsible spot. Like my Manager rightly reminded me, a wrong report and people could lose their jobs (He probably meant mine). Reports (Like CAG, Iraqi WMD) could tumble governments, spark wars and cost lives.

A seemingly all-powerful tool like reporting is often mismanaged in most organizations. Organizations do not put a lot of thought in to what should be reported. In Many cases people continue to look at the same reports that were used years ago.  Managers seldom look at reports with an intention of controlling or monitoring progress and processes. They (reports) are often used to present facts to larger audience or appease higher-ups.

Design elements:

In order to make best use of your reports, and dashboards we need to look at a few things that are mostly overlooked.

Align with organizational goals: Your reports, particularly the Dashboards should be aligned with the organization or the business unit’s goals. Example: your goal is to achieve 5% market share by year 2013 (and it is part of your vision statement) and reports only focus on your company’s sales figures.  Or your goal is to improve quality of your products, (1 rejection in 1000 let’s say) and all your reports and incentive system surrounds on volume of production. In the first case your dash-boards are not providing your enough information. In the second case the reports are distracting you from your original goal.

Actionable: Reports should drive action and not remorse. A lot of reports we use are much like my high school report card, they merely tell you what has already happened.

Frequency: Your investment advisor may have advised you not to look at your long-term portfolio returns on a daily basis. The more often you look at your returns, less likely it is to remain a long-term portfolio. Some measures should be seen less frequently than others. Eg: you are measuring performance (of an individual or a machine or a process) on a daily basis you will see fluctuations with no definite patter. Only over time you will see it change.

Another example for bad frequency is you look at your quarterly goals and your sales figures on a quarterly basis at the end of each quarter. Instead, if you look at the sales figures on a monthly basis, you will know how you fare against your quarterly goals. And one can ramp-up his efforts accordingly.

Org structure: and a place for reporting team: reporting team should always be centralized and separate from the team it reports on.     Reporting and analysis team could otherwise be under pressure to revisit numbers, metric definitions to suit individual needs. If managers from all departments exercising authority over  analyst, you may find analyst justifying purchase that are already made. Reports from a self serviced BI tool could be the best way overcome this problem.