Читать книгу Connected Planning - Ron Dimon - Страница 22

In working with my clients across a wide spectrum of business sizes, industries, and geographies, when it comes to barriers of improving performance, there are some “buckets” of pain I have found common to them all:

 More time is spent on assembling the numbers than on analyzing them—all this manual effort makes us inefficient and not very scalable.

 People show up to meetings with “their” numbers, and we don't know how they got those numbers—there is not a lot of confidence.

 Some people aren't getting the reports or analyses we're sending out—it either gets lost in their email or the right people aren't on the distribution list (or they're ignoring it).

 There is little alignment across functions (Sales, Marketing, Development, HR).

 People aren't following the prescribed processes, especially for submitting their plans and forecasts—they make different assumptions and interpret what we want differently.

 The right people don't have access to the right information, at the right time.

 Sometimes the data is just plain wrong—it doesn't include the latest numbers or it's an old version, or it's missing parts.

 There is a frustrating amount of “reinventing the wheel” and lack of coordination across teams—a group will create a process or system without knowing that there's already one in place.

 The reports are static and users can't interact with them—there's no depth (drill-down) or slice-and-dice.

 Sometimes their reports, plans, analyses, and models are just too complex to understand or believe—rules and transformations have been added on over the years unchecked and not auditable.

 Some of their key measures don't even have targets, so how will they know how they're doing? And where they do know, they're not sure who's responsible for the variance.

 People are working from different definitions (of customer, of employee, of revenue) and different formulas, making it difficult to compare apples to apples.

 They have data timing problems (e.g., daily sales, monthly expenses).

 They are living in “spreadsheet hell.”

These buckets of pain can be further summarized as a lack of foundational business elements as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 A Summary of the Buckets of Pain

A lack of …
Believability	I don't trust the numbers, also known as “one version of the truth” or data quality issues.
Visibility	I can't get to the numbers I need, when I need them, at the right level of detail, or they aren't fresh enough.
Focus	I have too much data and not enough actionable information.
Alignment	We are not on the same page regarding the drivers of the business.
Efficiency	Too much time spent manually extracting numbers, or on manual tie-out, or on reinventing reports and analyse that already exist.
Definitions	We don't agree on what numbers mean (e.g., Revenue—is that booked? recognized? commissionable?)
Accountability	No one is “on the hook” for the number, or the targets don't exist or are meaningless. There is no closed-loop from decision to result: Was it a good decision; did we achieve the return we imagined?