Dashboard
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Reporting is hard. Here's why and what we think needs to happen.
Connect the systems
Agree each measure
Show live decisions
Everyone reads the same number in the same way.
Reporting is hard.
Everyone needs it, but most people seem to struggle with it. If you're a business owner or MD, you might find yourself wading through reports from different teams that tell different stories. If you're a team head, you're probably happy enough with your teams' reports, but are frustrated that you can't get the wider business information you want easily enough. If you're in charge of BI or Data Science, you've probably seen plenty of projects go wrong.
We work with companies to improve reporting and find there are common themes:
- the same key measures have different meanings to different people
- it's difficult to tell if the reports are correct
- the reports are pulled together from lots of different systems
- the reports are difficult to work with
We like to split reporting into three parts: "data", "definitions" and "views".
Often the focus is on improving the "views", but that is like improving the colour scheme when the foundations of your house have subsided.
We find the focus tends to be on what you want to be able to see and how it's displayed, which is understandable. If your boss says to improve the reporting, the temptation is to show them some shiny new dashboards. However, if your data is messy and your team argue about what a measure means, improving the view will make things worse because you'll just end up with multiple pretty pictures of information that no-one trusts.
Definitions are what reporting is all about.
If you know what you want to measure, agree with other people what it means and believe the report, then you can make better operational decisions and plan ahead with more clarity.
What we do
The specifics will always be different, but our process follows a similar pattern:
- Understand what questions need to be answered and review your internal reporting. This includes looking at what data sources are available and accessible, who owns the data, existing reports and how they're used. Sometimes we're given access to everything, sometimes we need to request it, and it's not uncommon for some work to be required to make sure the data is correct. We also review definitions of key measures, which will often vary between people so we can help to reconcile them. We'll also challenge what should be measured, as it's easy to measure lots of things but harder to demonstrate the value of doing so.
- Make the data available for reporting. Using your existing tools for reporting or our own bespoke apps, we'll connect the data sources into a single place, usually a data warehouse. Once that's done, we'll write the agreed definitions as computer code, which helps us and other people understand them, review them in the future and make sure they can be recalculated. We'll only do this for defined and agreed measures.
- Create views to answer questions. Starting with the most important questions we'll either build reports to answer them or create views using a graphical tool.
- Share the love. We'll pass it back to you to add more views, connect alerts or build reports because it's your data.
How long will it take?
That is difficult to say. It will be influenced by the size of the business, how many systems need connecting and how much work needs doing to make sure the data is correct. We always aim to understand which measures are most important so we can create views for those first, and reporting will never be finished anyway.
How much will it cost?
We'll always be as clear as possible about costs, whether that's to third parties for tools and licences, infrastructure, platform costs and the level of service we provide. We can minimise costs by understanding what should be measured and ensuring we're building views which add value. This means smaller codebases that are less complex and cheaper to maintain and avoiding paying for reports nobody uses.
Who will own it?
You will. We'll never hold your hand on licensing, though we will advise what we think is best, and the codebase will be written so others can easily pick it up in future. We'd love to stay involved, on a monthly retainer, but will happily hand it all over if we're no longer needed.
Need a helping hand?
Get in touch...