Discipline
Data and analytics
Making the data hold what is going to be built on top of it and making the report change a decision.
4 services in this discipline
This is yours if
A project stalled the moment it reached the data.
In the committee, the discussion is about where the number came from, not what to do with it.
Management asked a question your reports do not answer.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
Decision-Grade Reporting (with Leading Indicators)
- Write in the margin which decision that page supports. If you cannot write it in one sentence, the page supports none.
- Mark the ones that only inform. Informing is fine, but not in the decision pack: those go into an annex nobody has to read in the meeting.
- Count how many are left. That is your real report.
- For every indicator that survives, ask who defines it. If two areas calculate it differently, that indicator will consume half of your next meeting.
- Pick an operational indicator and your financial result. For example cycle time against margin, or rework against revenue.
- Put them side by side by month, twenty four months. No averages and no smoothing: the raw data.
- Shift the operational one forward one month, then two, then three. The shift where the curves look most alike is your real lead, and many times it is zero.
- Repeat it with the period split into two halves. If the lead shows up in one half and not the other, it was coincidence.
Before you publish a leading indicator on a dashboard, decide who can move it and how you will notice: the one that gets exposed becomes a target.
It comes from Decision-Grade Reporting (with Leading Indicators). Every service in this discipline brings its own.
The 4 services in this discipline
Will your data hold what you are about to build on top of it?
Every area has its own version of the same figure and none of them match.
Whether your data can carry what you are about to buy, measured against a rubric and with the cost of closing each gap.
See the situationDecision-Grade Reporting (with Leading Indicators)Do your reports produce decisions, or only meetings?
The committee gets forty pages every month and leaves without deciding anything.
Every page of your report forcing a decision or no longer being produced. And the indicators that warn you earlier, with the lead time proven on your own data.
See the situationHidden value in your textWhat are your customers telling you that nobody has read?
We have years of tickets and complaints. There is something in there and nobody has had time to look.
Reading years of text is cheap now. What gets delivered is the point in your operation that the text keeps pointing to, quantified and verified case by case.
See the situationProduction model monitoringIs your model still working as well as it did on day one?
The model still answers. Nobody can prove it answers as well.
The measurement, the threshold and the shutdown criterion installed and handed over running to your team. We do not stay watching the dashboard.
See the situationIn the network
Where each of its services comes in.
By the cycle
Vanguard“I want to move forward” · guideForge“I want to implement” · buildTaskforce“I want to stabilize” · sustainEach thread is a service. A click on a door, another discipline or a service opens its page.
Or see it by the cycle: Vanguard, Forge and Taskforce. Or by the question you arrive with, in the seven questions. And if you already know the name, there is the full list.
What is the decision you have in front of you this week?