Reports – You Can’t Live Without Them. Or Can You?

In the parody movie Office Space there is a report that serves as a catalyst  for the plot.  It is of course the infamous TPS Report.  It is a MacGuffin.  The viewer it never finds out what it used for.

Do you have any like that?

Reports are like government agencies.  They most likely were created for a good purpose and served an important role once.  But as people, technology, and your clients or patients change,  your existing reports just keep getting generated and become less and less relevant.

And many of these reports are e-mailed, clogging up a an already saturated inbox and making everything harder to find.

One of the following situations then develops:

• Life goes on with outdated reports that no one reads.
• Reports are added to, making them more bloated
• Existing reports are replaced, or worse, supplemented, with a whole slew of new reports that are recommended by a vendor without a significant amount of vetting.

None of the situations is ideal.

Ideally, you have one report that you can access it via a link or a favorite, which contains all of the information you need and nothing else.  Or possibly, a very small number, but all located in the same place.

You can get there.

There is a wide array of reporting and automation tools that can accomplish this for you.  They are not hard to find.

And you should be able to drill down into reports, to be able to go from high level to details by clicking into graphs or links to make it easy and quick to look up supporting data.

But how do you evaluate what reports you want?

There is a simple tool called the 5 Why’s that can help do this very quickly.  Just call up your 5 year old self and start asking questions:

• Why was this report produced originally produced?
• Why is this data important?
• Why was this report created?
• Why is this analysis relevant?

The key is to keep digging down to figure out how that report makes a difference in your life.

There may be pieces of reports that you want to keep, so this does not have to be an all or nothing approach.

We are overwhelmed with data.  We have the ability to slice it up and present it in a myriad of formats and interpretations.  By distilling information and reporting on only what is truly valuable and then taking that step to automate it, as I wrote about in my last post, you can develop a powerful set of tools that is very easy and quick to use, saving time and focusing efforts on the important aspects of your work.