Start from the decisions
Which decisions the management meeting actually has to make, and what would have to be known to make them well. Not what the systems happen to be able to produce — that question comes later and answers itself.
Services
Data, Analytics & Business Intelligence
Most businesses do not have a data problem. They have an agreement problem — two departments producing different numbers for the same question, both defensible, and no established answer to which one governs.
The situation
What we usually find
For management teams whose meetings spend more time reconciling figures than deciding what to do about them.
The symptom is familiar enough to be a cliché. Sales reports one revenue figure, finance reports another, both can be justified from their own system, and the meeting becomes an argument about the discrepancy instead of a decision about the business.
The cause is almost always structural rather than technical. The same concept — a customer, a sale, a completed job, a month — is defined differently in each system, and nobody has written down which definition governs when they disagree. Both numbers are correct. They are answers to different questions that happen to share a name.
A dashboard built on top of that disagreement makes it faster and more authoritative, not more true. The work that matters is agreeing the definitions, integrating the sources and putting one figure in front of everybody. The dashboard is the last step of that work, not the first.
What changes
From where you are, to where this gets you
Most organisations arrive at this practice from a recognisable place. This is the distance it covers.
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Numbers living in separate spreadsheets
One integrated source everyone reports from
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A management pack that takes three days to build
A dashboard that is already current
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Different answers depending who you ask
One version of the figure everyone can stand behind
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Reporting requests queued behind IT
Managers answering their own questions
What this practice covers
The work itself
Engagements draw on whichever of these the situation needs. Very few use all of them, and we will say which we think apply before you commit to anything.
Getting the data together
Bringing figures out of the systems that hold them into one place that can be reported from, without breaking the systems themselves.
- Data integration
- Data warehousing
Agreeing what the numbers mean
Defining each measure once, with an owner, so the same question asked in two departments returns the same answer.
- Business intelligence
- KPI tracking
- Decision-support systems
Reporting that runs itself
Management information that is already current when the meeting starts, rather than assembled by hand in the three days before it.
- Management dashboards
- Executive reporting
- Self-service reporting
Looking forward, not only back
Analysis that supports the decision in front of you, rather than describing a quarter that has already closed.
- Financial analytics
- Operational analytics
- Forecasting
- AI-assisted insights
How it runs
What happens if you call us
Every engagement has a decision point at the end of each stage. You can stop at any one of them, and what you have paid for up to that point is yours to take elsewhere.
- 01
- 02
Trace every figure to source
Where each number originates, who owns it, how it is calculated and where two systems define it differently. This is the unglamorous stage and it is the one that determines whether anybody believes the result.
- 03
Build the single source
Integrate the sources, define each measure once, then reconcile the output against the figures the business already trusts. Numbers that cannot be reconciled to something familiar do not get believed, however good the model behind them.
- 04
Put it in front of people — and retire what it replaces
Handover to the managers who need it, and deliberate withdrawal of the spreadsheet it supersedes. Leave both running and you have not replaced the old reporting, you have added to it.
What you get
The things you keep
Advisory work is easy to buy and hard to hold on to. These are the artefacts that remain with you afterwards, and they belong to you whether or not the engagement continues.
- A definitions register: every reported measure, its source, its owner and its calculation
- An integrated data layer that the reporting runs from
- Dashboards built around the decisions being made, not around available fields
- A reconciliation against the figures the business already trusts, so the output is believed
- Handover so managers answer their own questions instead of queuing behind IT
Where this is not the answer
We will not build a dashboard on numbers we cannot reconcile. Presenting figures beautifully does not resolve a disagreement about what they mean — it makes the disagreement authoritative, and harder to unpick later.
Explore Data & Analytics
Tell us what you are trying to improve and we will tell you, plainly, whether we are the right people for it.
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