(and now that you have fallen for the clickbait, let me explain some very very common reporting errors)
Obviously the title is a strong provocation: reports, as they are often conceived and used, are useless. A potential, enormous waste of time and resources. Documents full of numbers that say everything and nothing, ending up being ignored or, worse, only generating confusion?
But understanding and admitting this is still a starting point. Because if reports often fail in their mission, the fault lies not with the tool itself, but with how we use it (or don’t use it). In this article, I will try to cut straight to the chase: I want to identify the most common reasons why reports become just waste paper (digital or otherwise) and I will also try to give you some tips and food for thought to turn them into working tools that bring real value.
1. The Aimless Report: That is, when numbers become just background noise
(That is: because starting out without knowing where to go is the first step to getting lost)
The first reason why a report is useless is brutally simple: it lacks clear and defined objectives BEFORE you even think about what data to include.
You, who are reporting, what exactly are you reporting?
Numbers are per narura neutral. They are neither good nor bad. An ‘opening rate of 15%‘ or ‘10,000 visits to the site‘ are just figures hanging in the air if we don’t have a yardstick that allows us to say: ‘ok, here we go! ‘ or ‘look there’s something wrong here‘. This means that whether those numbers indicate something positive (target achieved) or negative (target failed) depends entirely on what we set ourselves.
Without targets, the report becomes a mere collection of data. A collection of dice that, when read, only make you say “so what?”.
The next time you create or request a report, the first question to ask yourself is not “what data do I want?“, but “what ANSWERS am I looking for? What OBJECTIVES should this report serve? ” . The choice of data to include in the report is the natural consequence.
Only in this way will the numbers really begin to speak to you.
2. The ‘Sheet’ Report: Too Much Data, Zero Attention (and Shaky Patience)
If your report is longer than War and Peace, don’t be surprised if no one makes it to the last page.
There is no point in skirting around it, the average attention span has drastically decreased. And the time people have to devote to certain activities has also decreased. Information has to be fast.
And so we come to the second major mistake: producing reports that are a deluge of information instead of a strategic synthesis. You have to be able to identify the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that really matter, the ones that really serve to make decisions, and “report” only those. Otherwise the ‘signal’, the information that counts, gets lost in a sea of ‘noise’.
It is not a question of hiding data, but of presenting it intelligently. A clear dashboard with 5-7 key indicators is infinitely more powerful than a 50-page PDF. Ask yourself: ‘What are the 3-5 metrics that, if things were going badly, would trigger an immediate red alert for me? And which ones would tell me that things are going well? “. Start from there. Everything else can be explored in depth on request, but the visual must be immediate and meaningful.
3. Silent Numbers, Absent Analysts: Translating Data into Action
Another classic scenario: the report arrives, the numbers are all there, perhaps even well presented. But then? Silence. No explanation, no interpretation, no indication of what to do with that data. This is the third way to make a report perfectly useless: forgetting that you have to know how to interpret the numbers and provide a key to interpret them.
If your client, or your boss, or whoever is the recipient of the report, does not have the specific skills to decipher those metrics or understand the implications of a percentage change, the report has failed. It is our job, that of consultants, analysts, marketers, to turn raw data into understandable information and, most importantly, operational insights.
“The conversion rate has dropped by 10%“. OK, thanks for the update. But why did it go down? What happened in the analysed period? What assumptions can we make? And, above all, what do we propose to do to reverse the course?
Numbers, to themselves, are useless. One must be able to translate them into ideas, operational insights, indicators.
4. End of the task or beginning of the investigation?
What if the real value of a report is not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises?
Often reports are seen as the final act of an activity, the concluding document that draws conclusions. “We did the campaign, here is the report“. End of story. This approach is limiting and, in my opinion, deeply flawed. It is the fourth big mistake: considering the report as the last step, instead of the beginning of a new phase of investigation and discovery.
In fact, an effective report should not only serve to answer pre-existing questions, but to generate new, smarter and deeper ones. You look at the numbers and ask yourself: ‘Why did this happen? Why was there an abnormal peak in sales on this day? How do we justify this trend that we had not foreseen?‘.
These questions are gold. They are the spark that ignites curiosity, that drives one to delve deeper, to do new analyses, to test new hypotheses. From this it follows that reports should be the start of a cycle of continuous improvement, where each analysis fuels new questions, and each new question leads to new ideas.
But then, are reports really useless?
Of course not, it was a provocation. It all depends on how YOU make these reports and how YOU READ these reports.
A report without clear objectives is just a collection of numbers. A report that is too long and dense with superfluous data is a guarantee of being ignored. A report that does not translate numbers into operational information is a waste of resources. And a report that does not stimulate new questions is a missed opportunity.
But if we start building them from objectives, if we focus on the KPIs that really matter, if we take the trouble to interpret them and use them as a springboard for new investigations, then yes, reports can turn into really useful tools!
