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Measures, behaviour and the “Cobra Effect”
I learned something new yesterday. I heard about the “Cobra Effect”. When Britain ruled India there was a problem identified with the number of [venomous] cobra snakes in the country. The government decided to offer a reward for every dead cobra brought to the authorities.ย Initially it had the desired effect, reducing the number of…
When little report-production problems become a disaster
I’ve sat in a lot of MI (management information) departments over the years and have noticed a common theme. You can tell when there’s going to be highly visible (and embarrassing) failure in KPI and measure production well before the event. There’sย a wellย established concept called Heinrich’s Accidentย Pyramidย thatย asserts thatย a numberย near-miss events increase the probability of more…
Old news? When not to put data in a dashboard or report.
Some information can be essential to know on a second-by-second basis (heartrate, stock prices or altitude) other information is naturally slower to change; staff survey results, seasonal totals or audit results, for example. A quick way to devalue a dashboard or report and to turn off readers is to put data in the report that…
Dashboard? That’s just a posh name for a report, isn’t it?
I had an interesting conversation with a company lawyer a little while ago. We were discussing dashboards and she said “It makes me laugh when people talk about dashboards, it isย just a posh way of describing a report!”. It made me think as it seems to be a common misconception. What is the difference between…
Real life measures: Measuring efficiency in offices
Who is this article for? This article is a fairly technical article aimed at people who are looking to measure the efficiency or productivity of teams in an office-based environment, want a guide on how to measure efficiency and the system options for doing this. Article facts: Word count: 1320 Approximate time to read:…
A plain English guide to OEE
OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness. It is a very commonly used efficiency measure. What do we mean by efficiency? Put simply, it is “How much did we make, compared with how much we could have made.” OEE splits our efficiency down into three categories. The idea here is that we can get some understanding…
9 Things you should never do in Excel
Excel rules the roost when it comes to real-world management information. It’s easy to knock it, but millions of people find it quick and painless to use. There are some things you just should not do in Excel. Here’s my highly subjective list. Never…. Use Excel as a database. OK, I know you are…
4 Dos and Donโts For Leveraging KPIs to Improve Business Results
Leveraging KPIs does not always go as planned Rewind 20 years ago, our systems and processes did not always provide the data and reporting that we needed to effectively run our business. Today, with the incredible advances in most CRM, BPM, ERM (insert acronym here) systems, we often have too many numbers available to us.…
Using data to become a millionaire
It’s hard to believe, but many companies still see the data they collect as “a drain on IT systems” I really recommend reading this item on the couple behind the Tesco Clubcard scheme. It’s a brilliant tale of using high quality data to give a huge competitive advantage (“it is estimated that since its introduction…
“Compressor on”, how to label your reports more clearly
I just poured myself a cup of water from the water chiller. I noticed that it helpfully offers two temperatures of water and has a little light with “Compressor on” next to it. Why would you put this on a customer facing display? What they really mean is “this water cooler is working and cooling…