Are your Management Information team on “mission impossible”?

It’s a tough and thankless job producing MI for corporations. Expectations are sky-high (you can thank Star Trek for that) and many departments deliver in spite of huge technical and logistical issues – perversely making their own lives even harder.

Being so operationally focussed, it’s rare to have a chance to develop the internal-consulting skills they need and to have time to really nail down their mission.

Every MI department is different, but key themes keep on coming up. We can help with many of these issues and symptoms:

• Poorly understood and defined measures – leading to interminable debates and wrangles in meetings, justifications centred on the inadequacy of the measures and management by shouting.
• Antagonistic measures – measures and targets which drive exactly the wrong kind of behaviour to reach your strategic objectives.
• Confusing and badly designed outputs – reports that make you feel stupid, as you feel you should understand them, but don’t.
• Private “report factories” scattered around the organisation – during meetings and discussion managers will often produce “their own” reports and figures that prove their point, reports of unknown origin and accuracy.
• Shifting demands from senior management – frustration that drives managers to constantly ask for ad-hoc reports and trackers, sometimes on a daily basis.

No article can give you a quick-fix solution to problems like these, but a real human being can. If you have some of these issues please get in touch. Bernie would be happy to have a no-commitment-or-fee chat. Contact him here