Читать книгу Minding the Machines - Jeremy Adamson - Страница 16

One of the most memorable scenes from the 1990s classic Office Space involves the protagonist being chastised repeatedly by his coworkers and managers about an incorrectly prepared TPS report. The reason this was so memorable is that it reflects the experience of every office worker at some point in their careers. Bureaucracy is a self-propagating danger, and for many larger legacy organizations, entire teams are dedicated to the preparation and dissemination of unread reports. There are several compounding factors that have led to an explosion in the number of reports recently.

With legacy reporting tools, the effort required to create reports created a natural limit on the number that could be produced. This provided a control on the spread of new reports. Unfortunately, the strength and ease of use of reporting and visualization tools that are available today make creating new reports trivial.

In addition, as tenure at the management level falls over time, new managers arrive and request views of the data that are most conducive to their way of thinking. This, combined with a bias to action, can lead to a flurry of new reports, which are then promptly abandoned at the next reorganization but continue to be maintained.

Finally, a common rationalization for poor decisions by leaders is that they are due to a lack of information. In response to a personal error, and as a cover to their rascalities, it is not unusual for a new report to be requested, ostensibly to prevent the incident from recurring, but almost certainly as presentable evidence of their proactivity.

Despite all of these drivers of new reports, the organization could conceivably reach an isotonic point of stability where new reports are balanced by discontinued reports. Unfortunately, the process to sunset a report in most organizations is more onerous than the process to create a new one, leaving zombie reports that are diligently maintained by an army of analysts but unused.

For decision makers who have a more tenuous understanding of the value offering of analytics, and a desire to have better-informed decision making, the one-off choice to request that the team create a report can quickly become a pattern of distracting asks. At the expense of large transformative projects, more reports are created and maintained. Over time, the value of the analytics team is questioned.

How can this be prevented? Clearly articulating the value proposition of the team and ensuring from the start that it has executive support is essential to standing up a successful team. Respectfully pushing back against reporting and other non-value-add requests, though politically sensitive, must be done. Every member of the team must be empowered and given the autonomy to question the work that is being requested.