People often ask me for tips on determining what data to gather and report.  My answer is simple.  Don’t start with the data.  When you start by focusing on the data, you often wind up with too much data or data that don’t really help you make a decision.

Instead of thinking about what data you need, start by figuring out what questions you have or what decisions you need to make.  Once you determine that, your data requirements should be pretty clear.

Then, instead of reporting numbers, organize your reports around the answers to your questions.  For example, suppose you are reviewing your weekly performance metrics.  What is your question?  Why do you review those metrics?  You are probably reviewing that data to determine where and how urgently you need to focus your attention.  The answer to that is not a number.  It’s the name of a metric.  So why would you want to look at a spreadsheet full of rows and columns of numbers? That’s not efficient.

You don’t think about the world in terms of rows and columns.  For example, when you think about your workforce, you don’t imagine each individual and then recount all of the data you have on that person.  Instead, your brain “buckets” people based on the questions you are asking.  If it’s performance management time, you may divide your workforce into top performers (“go-to” people), middle performers, and low performers.  If you are planning a project, you may think about your people in terms of strategists versus executors.  You need numbers and data to place people into those buckets.  But, at the end of the day, you don’t really care about the numbers as much as you care about who is falling into which bucket.  Whether you are dealing with people, metrics, business units, products, or competitors, for every question you ask, you most likely have a set of buckets into which you are trying to organize the answer.

In the performance (metrics) report example, since the question is “where do I need to focus and how urgently”, you probably want to organize your metrics into three buckets:

·         Metrics requiring immediate attention

·         Metrics requiring follow up or monitoring

·         Metrics that do not require an intervention

Or perhaps you just have two buckets:

·         Metrics that require attention

·         Metrics that do not require attention

The number of buckets doesn’t really matter; there is no right answer.  The buckets should reflect how you are trying to organize the problem so that you can take action.

Instead of providing all of the data for each metric, simply place the name of each metric into the appropriate bucket. That’s it.  That’s your report.  You may still want to have the detailed spreadsheet available in case you want to drill down on one of the metrics.  However, by simplifying the initial report and organizing it around your questions/decisions, you will be able to understand the situation (and your decisions) more quickly and efficiently. 

There will always be more data available than you need.  Technology has made acquiring that data much easier and less costly.  As a result, many people are finding themselves inundated with too much data which is preventing rather than enabling good decision making.

Don’t start with data.  Start by figuring out what you need to know. Then collect the data relevant to those questions only. Finally, organize your reports around the answers, not the numbers.