Overview

Begin with whom you want to learn from…

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The Status Reporting Tool allows you to easily model your organization. The starting point for your use of the Status Reporting Tool begins before you enter your first template or schedule your first group to report out via a template. You begin by determining whom it is that you want to learn from; your groups of users.

The Status Reporting Tool allows you to specify the reporting hierarchy (actual, not dotted lines) in your organization. Each user is capable of specifying “personal templates” for information they wish to record on a regular basis. They can elect to keep this private or share it as part of their normal reporting process. This provides a genuine empowerment to the user by allowing them the flexibility to annotate their expected reporting. This can help spot areas which need attention as management should provide full details in the template provided to the employee. This feeling of empowerment benefits the company by encouraging the employees to be open and honest in their reporting and assessments providing a richer context to the business activities.

Continue on to what it is you wish to learn…

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The Status Reporting Tool offers great flexibility in what you can track. You can capture checkboxes (yes/no or true/false responses), 4 gigabytes of free text, a choice from a group of radio buttons or one or more choices from a dropdown list of options you specify. You can even embed templates within other templates to group common functions for use across multiple groups.

The starting point for your use of the Status Reporting Tool begins before you enter your first template or schedule your first group to report out via a template. You begin by determining who you want to learn from, your groups of users. You then determine what it is you wish to learn from each of these groups. By striving to be specific in what you want to learn you can achieve a much greater level of satisfaction with your reporting. For example, rather than allowing a database administrator to enter in free text the amount of uptime on your production servers, you might specify a list of choices and ask them to select from the list. This will ensure that when you wish to graph the uptime over time, you will get an accurate representation as opposed to parsing text to see if the uptime was 99%, (9 (mistyped). You may wish to create the list of choices, then provide a text area for the ability to note exceptions.

Then schedule how often you wish to gather your information…

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The Status Reporting Tool allows you to define how frequently you report out on what is important to your organization. Each group can report on a different schedule. For example, you may wish outside salespeople to report on a weekly basis, but you may wish to see daily Financial reporting while Information Technology may report weekly, or you may simply wish to put the organization on a weekly reporting frequency for consistency and ease-of-use. Regardless of how often the organization wishes to gather reports, individuals may update their report at any time during the reporting period and as often as they wish. It’s good to establish a habit of noting major milestones, decisions, interactions with others, etc. as soon after they occur as possible. Organizations who actively engage in promoting open communication benefit the most from the Status Reporting Tool. Individuals find it a great source of documented decision making, background information, and performance criteria.

One of the things that makes the Status Reporting Tool such an elegant functional addition to your organization’s tool chest is the simplicity with which you can implement it to capture that elusive information everyone thinks is being recorded elsewhere. It’s not your contact manager and yet it should be used to document customer interaction for two reasons; 1) you communicate to others that you’ve had a significant contact with the customer in a specific time period and 2) you document for future reference the fact that you’ve had this interaction. Why do this when you may employ another means, such as SalesForce.com? In most organizations, not everyone has access to the third-party contact management software. The Status Reporting Tool can be used by everyone and act as a central clearing house for your organization’s information. A simple note that contact was made and where to find the details to that interaction are all that’s needed. Others can do a quick search on the customer’s name and refer to that note to follow-up. It’s quick, it’s very easy to use, and it’s very efficient!

Your reporting schedules do not need to be daily, but individuals will want to get into the habit of opening their browser to the Status Reporting Tool as significant events occur or at the end of each day. This will allow the organization to keep it’s information fresh and it allows the employee to maximize their feedback on annual performance review. One of the greatest uses of the Status Reporting Tool is the ability of the individual to document their performance and interactions for the purpose of appraising their performance. For example, you may wish to create a template which assists an individual with their “Individual Development Plan”. You could lay out the organization’s expectations that must be met for a promotion and then track the individual’s progress through the Status Reporting Tool. It’s incredibly effective for Human Resources!

Now, gather your information…

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Entering a “status report” is a very simple process. Open your browser and login, your current report template is presented under “Edit Report” and you simply enter your notes and save. In just a moment or two of your time, you can capture the important events that take place in your daily work environment. This is “the” powerful concept behind the Status Reporting Tool: it’s non-obtrusive to your daily activities and yet it can increase your efficiency when you have to report out at a later date. For example, civilian contractors working on Department of Defense (DoD) contracts often have to fill out a “Monthly Status Report” to the government. In this, they have to spell out what work was performed under the contract for the given month, often times reporting by the individual user’s work performance (to validate against an invoice). Using the Status Reporting Tool to easily collect daily activity information from the individuals charging to that DoD contract, a manager can simply ask for the date range of the prior month to create a report of all activity by those individuals. Using the interface for “Jasper Reports”, a manager could create a report that contains all the header and footer information the government requires and have the Status Reporting Tool fill in the individual’s activity. An agonizing monthly situation is now a minimal amount of effort.

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Another situation where the Status Reporting Tool shines is the employee performance review. Managers must be balanced, fair and honest in their appraisals. But while we’re blessed with great memories, we often have a lousy ability to recall events, especially those that occurred without our knowledge from close to a year ago. For example, the employee takes an action that saves an account or at the very least shows initiative and good decision making which earned praise from a customer. Will that be remembered eleven months later when it’s time to do an annual review? The individual will remember it! If it’s not documented or worse the individual is encouraged to take more initiative in the future, they will feel slighted or at the very least have questions in their mind about the fairness of the manager. With the Status Reporting Tool, the manager can ask for the individual’s reports for the past twelve months and then quickly glean that information which is relevant to the employees “complete performance”. Documented patterns are easy to see and hard to refute. Course corrections can be made along the way and justification for a change in responsibilities and thus performance documented. This allows both the individual and the manager to sit down and look objectively at the performance against expectations. The review process now turns into focusing on expectations and how to capture those in a template so the individual maximizes their performance in the coming year. And what company doesn’t want their employees to be working in a healthy, productive environment at their peak performance?!

Then Mine, Report Out, and COMMUNICATE your information!

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By now, you may have noticed that we’ve talked about “information” and not “data”. Taking data and turning it into information is often a time-consuming task of mining a repository, refiing your search criteria, and iterating through a process of drilling down to get at what you want to know. While this is certainly possible with the Status Reporting Tool, the act of defining what it is you wish to know up-front, in the creation of templates, helps the Status Reporting Tool to deliver information, not just data. There are times, however, when you’ll want to look back over time and ask yourself questions you had not thought of before. For this, there are tools to search on the information in the Status Reporting Tool repository. You could also easily attach a third-party front-end tool such as Business Objects to generate ad-hoc queries. Capturing the information in an organized manner (the templates) is key to quickly understanding the organization’s behavior (e.g. monthly reports). But you will always want to have those sections of your template for “other remarks”; the large, free text blocks where an individual can note exceptions, concerns, suggestions or unexpected events. Over time, reviewing the reports will generate new questions such as “why are we seeing this more than once? How many individuals are devoting time to that activity?” You may wish to modify the template(s) to uniquely report on a specific activity as well as capture the amount of time being spent on it.

The information captured by the Status Reporting Tool should be used to enhance an organization’s ability to communicate. Thus, there are e-mail capabilities built-into the tool. You can specify that a group’s report be automatically e-mailed to a list of users (or a distribution list at your mail server) at the end of the reporting period. This alone is a great reason to keep your reporting periods to no longer than a week. You can set your reporting period to be midnight on Friday (or Sunday) and the first thing individuals can do Monday morning is peruse the weekly status to review what their group (or groups) have been doing. For a geographically dispersed organization or an organization that relies on sub-contractors and/or outsourced third-parties, this can be a very effective tool to facilitate the team’s performance!