So, what are some best practices when creating a report, yourself? This article is the first in a series designed to help you create clear and succinct reports for any business scenario.
Who is your audience?
Your best start is knowing the audience you’re making a report for. At Apptio, we refer to different audiences as “personas,” which represent the different roles or teams within an organization. Just as a quick reminder we are not referring to the Personas that are assigned to Apptio users as part of their security settings in our application. Instead, we’re simply using personas as an easy way to summarize the services, products, challenges, perspectives, and biases of your various team. For example:
- If an Application Engineer needs a report, consider that they may need specific spend and usage information related to the applications they are working on.
- If an IT Finance employee needs a report, concentrate more on budget KPIs, and make sure data is portioned using the time scale as your finance department (quarters, Fiscal Year, etc.).
- If an CFO, CIO,or CTO (commonly referred to as the C-Suite) needs a report, consider if they are digging into specific issues or if they'd need a more "state of the union" report.
Why are they asking for this report?
Once you've identified the personas you're creating for, the next question is “why.” Why is this report requested or necessary? Was there a specific data point that is not revealed in other reports? Are there specific problem areas that require more clarity?
Understanding “why” means getting specific about the data that is being requested, and the insights that data provides. Let’s return to the Application Engineer example again. We used a persona to generalize the data they might need, but now we must know the questions they need answered. The Engineer may explain that their application’s cloud spend is over-budget and they need to know why. Or they need data to clarify how much of their labor budget they’ve used so far.
Remember: Once you’ve identified the type of data the persona may need asking why will be your next step. This is the essential clarification of the data needs of your audience.
Example – Starting to create a C-Suite report
So now that we have our starting point let’s put that into practice, starting with an example where we’ve been asked to create a State of the Union report for our C-Suite. Let’s apply our questions and see how we could use this to create a better report.
- Who’s my target audience?
On a basic level we know that this report was requested by our C-Suite, originally by our CFO. C-Suite reports are traditionally created to display data as an overview, revealing spending across multiple portions of our business. This puts me in the mindset immediately that I’ll probably be needing to create this report broken out into multiple different segments, rather than one single deep drill down.
- Why are we making this report?
When we ask “why” we find out that because we’re halfway through the first quarter our C-Suite team would like to know how close our different departments are tracking to their budgets, as well as giving an overall view of the spend coming from our primary business units. From their answer we can now focus on the types of data we’d like to reveal in our KPI’s, charts, and tables. Our original premise that we’d need to make more of a summary report, based on the C-Suite persona, was right but now we've confirmed the specific type of question they'd like answered.
It’s said that getting started is often the hardest part of any project, but now you have the hard part out of the way! You know who your audience is and you have the necessary detailed information as well. Our next step Is how we enter the data into our report. In our next article, we’ll cover report creation best practices, such as templates, positioning, sizing, and other tips to create the most effective layout for your report. We'll be looking forward to seeing you then!
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