Three Questions to Ask Before You Build Any Report

In God we trust; all others must bring data
– W. Edwards Deming

As a consultant in reporting and data science, I am brought in to help small-to-medium businesses in New Zealand transition from traditional reporting to advanced data science. As a first step, I assess the current state of the reporting suite. It is during this phase that I notice most firms have a very large number of reports where most of them are unreliable for one reason or another. A report revamp project is often the first action. This can be achieved by asking three simple questions to identify opportunities of revamping or consolidating the reports. In this article, I speak about those three questions. A reliable reporting suite is the first step to transitioning into advanced data science projects.

Introduction
Traditionally, businesses needed reports for compliance purposes. More precisely, it was mandatory to build and share reports for taxation purposes. Over the years, businesses realized the value of data driven decisions and therefore, the need for reports spread from finance teams to marketing, sales and strategy teams. However, most of the reporting was still based out of spreadsheets.

 

By the early 2000s the adoption of reports increased to an extent where a simple spreadsheet was not easy to distribute and therefore, reporting software tools gathered momentum. However, building a report still required an IT specialist.

 

By the late 2000s more interactive reporting tools focussing on the visualisation aspect began to gain adoption. The reports were more intuitive and easier to use. This ease of use in-turn led to a much higher adoption and eventually led to what is referred to as self-service reporting i.e. business people can build reports with much less training.

 

While all this sounds really exciting, it comes with a few challenges. Now that anyone can build a report, everyone has a report. In other words, it’s not the lack of reports that is a problem but rather the abundance of them.

 

This abundance of reports led to reporting suites that are unreliable. Working with multiple businesses for over 18 years, I found that there are three key questions to ask the requestor before a report is built. These questions make the report more relevant, resourceful and reliable over time.

 

What is the Purpose?
Every report needs a purpose for its existence. Furthermore, that purpose must be unique. In other words, it cannot share a purpose with another report. This is the first and the most important of all the questions to ask before a report is built.

 

Once the purpose is understood, the existing reporting suite needs to be explored for any report that already serves the purpose. Where there are reports that serve the purpose partially, options must be explored to see if a simple case of changing the existing report is more optimal instead of building a new one.

 

This question helps in maintaining a reporting suite that has much less redundancy and thereby reduces the cost to maintain and enhance it in the future.

 

Who is the Audience?
A report must be intended for a particular audience. Generally, this is evident from the earlier question of purpose. However, it is common to see more people added to the report because they need to be ‘in the loop’. This makes the report less relevant for them. While this may not seem like a problem at the beginning, this leads to report hijacking.

 

For example, if a report is meant for the sales leader, it may seem logical in the beginning to add the CEO to the report audience. However, the CEO also gets reports from the finance team. Now, the year-to-date revenue from the finance report will not match the same from the sales report. This leads the CEO asking for the sales report to have a view of the financial year.

 

This result would change the value proposition for the sales leader. Therefore, the sales leader will request for another specific report for themselves. This new report gets someone else added.

 

This series of chaos continues. Therefore, the audience needs to be as specific as possible right from the beginning.

 

What is the Expected Outcome?
Every report needs to enable the audience in getting something done. It could be a report that needs to be shared with someone for compliance reasons or to identify whether an action must or must not be taken.

 

For example, if it is a revenue leakage audit report, the outcome is evaluating if and where the revenue is leaking from and whom to contact to get it sorted.

 

The major reason for this question is to ensure there are no vanity reports in the reporting suite. In other words, reports that seem important, but no one uses them over time.

 

Concluding Remarks
In this article we understood the reason why purpose, audience and outcome are the most important attributes of any report and how asking the right questions sets your reporting suite up for success.

Sidharth Macherla is the founder and principal consultant at FOYI, a data consultancy specialising in reporting and data science (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidharthmacherla/).

 

See Sidharth’s profile here.

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