Making Incoherent Reports Make Sense

I challenged myself this afternoon to write in the most un-John like manner possible in an effort to write a completely incoherent post. Why? Well apart from being able to, I thought it could be a great metaphor for the jumble of information many managers are presented with, disguised as management reports.

Jumble, I thought. Incoherence, mmmm. Ok, so the Olympics are about to start, Pokemon Go is still the rage and rumoured to be included at the Tokyo games, those in Sydney have had winter hit at last, the temperature has hit 30 degrees, Jarryd Hayne has almost signed with the Sydney Swifts netball team (and will be going to Tokyo playing Pokemon). Incoherent. I just can’t do it! Grrr!

So back to coherence. We often work with clients who’s senior managers complain that they are presented with information that doesn’t make much sense. So I thought, what are the key things to make presentation of information work? (and here I am really interested in your feedback!).

Six Steps to Deliver Blockbuster Reports

Here are my top six tips for ensuring you always engage with your audience:

1. Have a Clear Objective for presenting anything. If you don’t have a clear reason for creating or supplying a report, analysis or presentation, then how do you ever check that you’ve delivered on what is required?
2. Use a Title that Talks! Churning out a report each month exactly the same as the prior month says little . How about changing the title from “Monthly Sales Report” to “July Sales Report by Rep” and add a subtitle “Fred Bloggs improved performance YTD v Budget by 20%”.
3. Highlight the stuff that Matters. Just presenting a crosstab and expecting it to be read and understood is just lazy. Use your knowledge of the business to make relevant information jump out at the reader. Or add conditional formatting to show the good or bad
4. Use Graphs. Can the information be presented graphically? Often we’ll present information in as numbers in rows and columns. Then we might add some formatting, but still it does not tell the reader the whole story easily. We expect the reader to actually read the data! Add a graph, or even replace the crosstab with a graph completely.
5. Present Summarised Information that is “consumable”. Have you ever looked at a variance report for a cost centre that shows Actual vs Plan vs Last Period by GL Account. One Hundred rows long five columns for the month and another five for year to date. Then another column for “Variance Explanation”. What a waste of time. How about summarising the 100 or so GL Accounts into no more than 15 or 20 higher level aggregate accounts and presenting that on one page? Then put it online and add a drill through to the detail so if you really need to see all the accounts you can.
6. Make Sure it Cross Adds. Yeah, yeah. I know, I’m an accountant, but the amount of times I come across reports that don’t add both across and down is extraordinary. Accuracy must be the most fundamental requirement of any report. Without it, you instantly lose credibility. So just for good measure, add a cross check into a formula outside the print area.
7. Visualisation and Dashboards. Investigate the use of data visualisation and dashboards. But that is another story completely (and therefore is outside the “six”)!

Why, Why and Why!

The most important thing in the creation and distribution of any report needs to be “why”. Why are you producing it and then does it answer the question. If not, why are you producing it?

Enjoy!