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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…
Are your KPI reports a mess? A half day report-design course.
Do you wish you could glance at a simple report or dashboard and instantly grasp the key opportunities for your business? Dashboards have become increasingly popular in recent years, but many don’t deliver their full potential. If they don’t deliver instantly what the user needs, then the chances are they will never be used again.…
Do You Work for an Idiot?
Here is a process improvement idea for you. It is called “poke yoke”. I am told that that is Japanese for “making things easy to get right and difficult to get wrong”. It is a rather grand name for what my old boss used to call “idiot proofing”. Let me give you an example: think…
Graphs, your choice of watch and how not to get eaten.
I can still remember how excited I was when, aged 7, I got my first digital watch. It was clear to me that digital watches, with their accuracy and lack of complicated hands, were going to conquer the world. So why am I here 33 years later with an analogue watch? Surprisingly it’s to do…
How to get a perfect quality score in 24 hours…
Many KPIs and targets can be an invitation for creative dishonesty. How do you make sure you don’t accidentally drive self defeating behaviours?
Too many reports? A great tip…
A friend of mine recently mentioned her brilliant tip for finding out how many people read the reports that you send out. She decided to password protect the regular report that she sent out to over 300 people. Just two people requested the password. If you have a sneaking suspicion that people aren’t reading the…
Pointless Pies
I’d like to ban pie charts. I know it’s a bit over the top, but I honestly can’t see a single thing they do better than other graph type (like a 100% stacked bar). They are also hopeless at lots of other things, namely: You can’t trend with them. Yes, you can put a few…
1000 irritations or 1 catastrophe?
How most banks complaints systems drive them to fix trivial problems first and ignore the rarer customer disasters.
Why some KPIs are like pasta makers
We keep things for lots of reasons. Understanding why we hang on to kitchen gadgets we never use can help us work out tactics for getting rid of unused KPIs.
