Welcome in Reporting Hell

In business the reporting is a standard practice everyone accepts but it often turns into a massive waste of time and bullshit show leaving participants disappointed and disgusted. Let's summarise here the things to do and not to do.

What is the purpose of a reporting?

It is to transmit a compilation of information to a specific audience (usually a management group). This information should be accurate, objective and complete. The audience then needs to make decisions based on that input.

This information is usually a set of KPIs and associated comments.

Simple right ? Well if this is that simple and obvious why most reporting exercises are turning into a gigantic mess?

Usual reasons for failure

1. Inaccuracy: I observed many cases where the audience was questioning a number with an infinite variety of reasons, remarks, useless statements, all this bringing ZERO VALUE to the purpose of making a decision. If the data is inaccurate there is only one thing to be decided: how to fix it. I remember a terrible reporting made out of spreadsheets manually corrected locally and put together by a remote team and paste into a PowerPoint presentation. What a shame!
2. Objective: dealing with hard facts (numbers) can be hard enough but irrational input should be rejected. I had a case when, due to system failure in reporting a number, the team used SMILLEYS to describe their FEELINGS about the result... Nope, you are not dreaming, this exists. Another case was manual "corrections" brought by the local team because again a defective process or system. How many hours did they spent trying to figure out what the correct number was ? Where are the evidence this new "magic" number is the right one except the consensus around emphasised by one H.I.P.P.O. nodding ? Let's be serious, only a number directly read from a single source, with no possible manual "correction" can be discussed. All the rest is potential crap.
3. Complete: define your KPIs, eliminate your PIs. Focus on a small set of data in order to get the decision made to impact the business. I had a case of a company using 700 KPIs in their reporting..... no kidding, this is madness. Usual purchasing KPIs are Quality- Delivery - Costs with sometime Development - Management and that's it. Pick up ONE in each dimension, you got your reporting.

Purchasing reporting example

• Quality (%): supplier failure target is 20 ppm / 99.8% of good parts - actual is less than expected, e.o.y. forecast shows the target will be nearly missed (Yellow)
• Delivery (%): delivery exact in quantity and on exact due date target 100% - actual is better than expected in the month, e.o.y. forecast shows the target will be nearly missed (Yellow)
• Costs (%): purchasing cost reduction target 5%, actual is 4.5% better than expected in the month (Green), e.o.y. forecast shows the target will be nearly missed (Yellow)
• Development (%): initial samples delivered 1st time right and on time at serial price target is 100%, actual less than expected in the month (Yellow), e.o.y. forecast shows the target will be nearly missed (Yellow)
• Management (%): contracts target 100%, actual less than expected in the month (Yellow), e.o.y. forecast shows the target will be nearly missed (Yellow)

A simple spider chart can complement it to materialise the gap in a more visual way.

Discussions to have during the reporting call

• What are the root causes of the deviations ? (what happened?)
• Are these causes fixable ? (can we fix or mitigate the effect?)
• Are the additional resources needed to fix the cause worth the effort ? (shouldn't we accept the deviation instead of spending more resources on it?)

Anything else should be banned from the reporting meeting and discussed in a separate meeting.

Conclusion

If you are a manager

• keep in mind you are here to help your team so remove all non value added and negative comments from your vocabulary and only ask the 3 questions above. Most important and difficult: keep your mouth shut. You are here to listen at your people not the other way round. Free your team from your influence!
• If you are given reliable hard facts, your role is to take a decision. Do not throw the hot potato at anyone else typically by asking for more information. It is you job to decide and it is here and now not later in a to-be-planned-meeting-in-order-to-better-investigate-the-situation. Ask your team for a recommendation, follow it.

If you are a team member

• be transparent about what is accurate - objective - complete and what is not. Focus on the first, be clear that you cannot engage a discussion and your team responsibility on the second.
• make a recommendation on each and every decision to be made by your manager

By the way, the time spent to prepare a reporting should be reduced to..... ZERO. The reporting should be available anytime anywhere by anyone of the selected audience. It means full automation, totally reliable process and system. The only preparation work for the team is to review the results and plug in the comments with assorted recommendation every time a decision has to be made. I know it is working, I built one of those.

Any questions, remark ? .................................................. good, end of the meeting, have a great evening