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• Life goes on with outdated reports that no one reads.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.

Automation Is Not A Four Letter Word

People love reports containing a lot of charts and graphs. Let me rephrase that. People love reports while containing lots of charts and graphs that other people create. After all, gathering all that data, mashing it together, analyzing at, and putting it into a form that tells a story is where all of the work is. And if you have to do that once or twice, that is probably not a huge deal. But, if you are doing that every day or every week or every month, you need to automate that.

In any business, there is a group of people who provide customer service also have to collection data and fill in reports for some higher level of management. Free those people. If they have to do any kind of data entry, find a way to eliminate it. Any reports they build or for which they enter data for can be automated. People can then look at the output and provide comments or interpretation as needed. Then, they can spend more time doing things that make your customers, patients, or clients keep coming back. That might include:

additional interaction with your customers

additional training or work with your front end staff to make them better

time to focus on some of the hundreds of things that office and department managers do

doing what humans do better than any computer – deal with other humans!

With the power of spreadsheet programs and a whole slew of reporting software that can reach right into databases and pull out information, do the analysis, and present output in the format you want, there is no reason for a person to have to do all of the grunt work anymore. Your time can go into looking at the results of all the data crunching and making thoughtful decisions about it.

Now, there are people out there that love to crunch numbers. They love to take that raw data and manipulate it, looking for ways to improve processes or outcomes. I am definitely one of them. These are people that you should definitely get tools to offload a lot of the repetitive data analysis tasks. They will pounce on the opportunity and dive into a world of advanced analytics and fantastic results.

So, go out there and invest in automating those reports. Your payback goes beyond time saved to a potentially huge opportunity gain that can only pay dividends.