Like you, I consume a whole lot of reports every day – company data, public data.
Many are acceptable, some are very good and all the rest leave me extremely frustrated with both the ink and the think.
People make so many obvious mistakes. Sometimes repeatedly.
Just yesterday I was quietly seething because none of visuals included in the report contained any context to understand if the performance I was looking at was good or bad.
Rookie mistake.
The graph could be going up, down, all around and I as a consumer had the job of figuring if something was good, bad or worth ignoring.
The heartbreaking part is that most executives will take a look, realize the difficulty in interpretation in 15 – 20 seconds, and go back to shooting from the gut. Even if the report has hidden gold.
In a move that might not surprise you, I sat down with the person for 90 minutes going visual by visual, table by table, directing changes that would ensure everything had context.
A report usually has a hard time explaining why something is going awry or going really well. (That is why you have job security as an Analyst!)
A report can usually be very good at clearly highlighting what is going well or badly.
Your #1 job is to make sure your reports don’t fail at this straightforward responsibility.
So today a simple collection of tips that you can use to up-level your reports – to allow them to speak with a clear, and influential, voice.
For many of you a reminder of what you might have let slip, for others a set of new things to implement as you aim for your next promotion.
#1. Context, Context,