Hi all,
The last part of Plain Talk I wanted to cover was about reporting. As I’ve done for a number of books recently, I’ll take a few of Ken Iverson’s ideas and try to riff off of them whenever I see the opportunity to add a note or two of my own.
Good luck, reader.
Gather information that is as easy as possible for others to put together.
Try to gather information that tells you what you must know during ordinary times while also giving advance warning of upcoming ‘extraordinary’ times.
Information overload tends to come with unneeded explanation.
These three thoughts, though basic, strike me as just the sort of thing that anyone can lose sight of if a reporting process is put together without taking a moment to consider basic principles. Reporting is an ever-present threat to an organization because it can quickly expand to use up time and energy without leading to any improvement in performance. Good reports should be easy to put together, completed well enough in advance to give the organization time to prevent disasters, and delivered with minimum interpretation lest the reporter’s point of view influence or bias the conclusions reached by those reading the report.
Try to distinguish between subjective and objective information gathering.
Like with the prior point, this is a distinction that could easily get lost if the reporting method isn’t carefully defined. In many poorly organized reports, information is accompanied by a number rating or letter grade to give a sense of objectivity to what would otherwise be an obviously subjective measurement.
Simply demanding that all objective figures must be displayed in table or chart form is a great first step. If the reporter has any other information that can’t be quantified in this way, it would obviously be subjective (and perhaps reported in writing).
Objective – some key metrics a manager should ask for from the team include bids, orders, production, backlog, inventory, and shipments.
Subjective – establishing a pattern of regular and informal conversation with the team is an important way to gather data about hard to measure variables like confidence.
As the first point outlined, a good report is easy to put together. This applies both to the manager and the subordinate. The objective part of any report should come as directly as possible from the work being measured – for example, if the inventory level is being reported, the worker in charge of the inventory should provide the figures.
The manager should take responsibility for the subjective part of the report. The manager should leverage all methods of information gathering to accomplish this task. If the report turns out to be erroneous or misleading, the manager should be the one held accountable.
Although hounding subordinates for information is not advised, delegation without information is not a very effective way to run an operation.
A manager who makes the team responsible for reporting accomplishes two things. First, the team gets a better understanding of how their performance is being measured and knows what information to pay the most attention to during the workday. Second, it makes it easier to gather information quickly in the event of a sudden emergency because the team is used to helping the boss gather information.
A good report should fit on one regular piece of printer paper.
Reports should create context by making comparisons against week, month, quarter, and prior year’s corresponding quarter (in this example, a quarter is equivalent to a thirteen week period).
A good way to implement these thoughts is to limit each page of a report to answering one question. If a manager adopted the reporting standard described above, the result would actually mean a five-page report – the first page would account for present conditions while the next four pages would make the contextual comparisons against the time periods described in the note.
Good reporting tracks cause and effect. A monthly or quarterly report should track the results generated from the operations that were tracked in the weekly reporting – costs against budget, return on assets, and sales revenue.
Cause and effect here means tracking how operational measurements impacts performance and output. If the operational reporting tracked a steady 10% rise in purchases of raw materials over a three-month period, the performance reporting should include some kind of anticipated increase in output that corresponded to how raw materials correlated to output in the past.
The lag time of any operational change on output is also a critical consideration. If a change in the level of raw material makes no impact on output for the first half year after the purchase, it would mean anticipating an output change in any of the six subsequent monthly reports would be premature.
Irish wolfhounds, French baguettes wrapped loose around, and next I think I’m hungry…
Finally, good reporting recognizes the immense responsibility of the task. When someone reads a report, they are asked to focus on one specific part of the organization while simultaneously ignoring everything else. This puts the reader prone to the sudden mental jumps and casual associations everyone makes from time to time. The reporter recognizes this and ensures the report is as informative as possible while remaining entirely impartial.
Right?
What…?
Fine – that note isn’t from Plain Talk, it’s a lyric from Courtney Barnett’s ‘An Illustration of Loneliness’. But hey, it’s a riff off, and who better to have the last word?
Thanks for reading, folks.
Tim
