Improve
Are you looking at the right data to manage your business?
As business owners, leaders, and managers, we are all used to using reports and management information in order to track and manage how are businesses are performing on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis.
When working with clients, I have on occasion been surprised at just how many different reports are generated across an organisation – and when I see extremely large numbers of reports, some of the questions I raise are:
- How many of these reports do you actually use?
- Who uses them and what are they for?
- How do you use them to drive business decision-making?
Maybe you will not be surprised to learn, that on many occasions, what we discover by asking these questions is that much of the information is either not used, the use and user is unknown, or the recipients of the information are unclear about how the information should be used to help them manage the business.
All indicators that it is time to take a step back, review your reporting and consider what data should we be collecting and measuring in order to best manage our business?
Easy to say, but not so easy to do – as it takes time and considerable thought and input from a (usually) busy management team. However, the rewards and returns on time invested in this exercise, in my opinion are worth it, as the outcome will be a streamlined and consistent set of business metrics, that can be reliably used to measure how your business is performing against its objectives.
Why review and clean up your reporting suite? What are the risks if you do not?
- Businesses evolve over time and strategies and objectives change. If you are using ‘old reports’, you might not be looking at key performance indicators which are no longer aligned to your strategic objectives.
- It is important that your management team are using a consistent data set to measure, track and report on performance. If reporting across different departments is not based on a different data set, you will likely get different results – how will you know which data to rely on?
- Remove waste and improve management effectiveness. Some of your reporting many be system-generated and fully automated, but others may be requiring manual intervention and preparation which takes up valuable resource. Time and effort are wasted on producing reports which are not actually used. Management emails fill up with reports which are not used. If information on the reports is not produced in a timely fashion it can already be out of date by the time it is produced and consumed.
10 Step Structured Approach to reviewing your reports and business data
- Report Audit. Collate a list of all existing reports, who uses them, for what purpose and whether they are still needed or not.
- Understand the effort required in producing each report – which are system generated and which require manual intervention.
- Categorise reports into Financial, Operational, People, Customer
- Set out up to date requirements for each category and business area, the key business measures that are needed to manage the business and drive effective business decision making, the frequency, timeliness and format of how the data will be delivered.
- Carry out gap analysis – review your data requirements against current available data and reports. What data do you have (and currently measure today), what data would you need to collect and measure. What would be the effort in filling data gaps and how important is it to your decision making (this will inform the priority you give to filling any data gaps).
- Set out new reporting suite and align management team
- Assign resource to collate required data and create reporting suite
- Baseline your data set to gauge data quality – is data complete, accurate and available in a timely manner?
- If data quality an issue, set out tasks and timelines to cleanse your data and put in place data management processes to ensure acceptable levels of data quality are maintained.
- Construct a stakeholder engagement and communications programme – clearly communicate how the business will be measured and managed going forward, process controls around reporting, how managers should be using the data to measure and monitor performance, and what KPIs are being used to measure operational and employee performance.
With good quality, appropriate and timely data at your fingertips which is used as a consistent data set across your organisation, you can be more confident that the business decisions you make are based on a trusted source.
Contact me today on 01702 879548 or drop me an email enquiries@harley-west.com.
