The other day, while I was watching my five year old son's indoor soccer game I noticed that I was following the action in the wrong game? Why? The reason is simple enough, my son was playing a field over and the spectator stands are only available on one side of the field, which meant that I had to keep my focus on the second field instead of the game being played right in front of me!
I believe that our planning and reporting can suffer the same 'lack of focus'. It can occur for a few reasons, including:
- Spending more time collecting and organizing data than analysing the data
- Budgeting/forecasting at an inappropriate level of detail, effectively drawing our focus from key business drivers that should receive more relative focus and giving equal weight to administrative expenses
- Routinely generating, reviewing and analyzing a standard set of reports, as opposed to interacting with the data and performing 'ad-hoc analysis' on key areas and variances
