Management Needs a Stamp of Freshness

How do you understand what is happening in your organization?

I recently observed a sales organization take deal data from their CRM system and put it into an excel document to share with the leadership team.

Why, I thought, would this organization with significant discipline and sponsorship of centralized data take a single step down the path of decentralized data?

In this case, the significant reason was that Excel captured the qualitative information – that is, the conversational information with a stamp of freshness attached.

I would like to make a few comments about the importance of qualitative information. I would also like to know if anyone else has felt the urge to put data into Excel for similar purposes.

Whether it be sales opportunity information or project status information, we want quick status updates that are meaningful. What this Excel document had that the CRM solution did not was a fresh conversational status field containing about 8-10 words summarizing where the deal was (BTW – there is a case for the 140 character Twitter limit – no stories please, just the thoughtful facts). In other words, this document, sent around on a daily basis, represented the latest in MBWA data.

It is important to note that the CRM system mentioned could generate reports on stages, probabilities, days in the current stage, expected deal close date, and a thousand other variant ways of slicing and dicing data. The one thing it couldn’t do was express what the sales rep was thinking about that deal right now today. This fault was enough to cause someone to look elsewhere for ‘good’ data. What is the definition of ‘good’ data? Aren’t the probabilities, stages, histories, amounts, & etc. good?

Yes and no. They are good in that if they were accurate, you could make great decisions. They are not good in that people don’t trust them. By the way, we have seen this same behavior with project management systems too. People have a lot of data; green yellow and red dots; projections, plans, variances, costs, potential revenues, efficiency metrics, trends, & etc. When it comes to executive review, one piece of data seems to decide whether a project or sales opportunity, a project manager, or a sales manager gets additional executive attention – that piece of data is the conversational status and it’s freshness.

Here is an example illustrating the point. Suppose green means that the project is on schedule and yellow means that it’s running behind…

As an executive, which project do you want to drill in on? You can see how easy it is for qualitative, information to guide decision making.

At AtTask, we recently commissioned an independent survey through Forrester about about Social Project Management and the use of social tools in management practices. One finding we derived from the survey was that the #1 most recognized factor (by a wide margin) for improving data accuracy in project and task reporting is the capturing of qualitative information.

By way of definition, qualitative information needs to have a ‘stamp of freshness’ attached or it becomes worthless. I would suggest this holds true of all management and reporting systems. Social tools as simple as the update with visible freshness will dramatically increase the trust given to any data by an executive.