Interactive guide
Make the Work Reportable
Somebody asks how the inbound follow-through is doing. The answer takes four days, involves three people exporting things, and arrives with a caveat nobody can evaluate. Then somebody asks a slightly different question and the whole exercise starts again.
The instinct is to blame the reporting tool. The tool is almost never the problem. The process was built to complete work rather than to leave a trace of it, so the data that would answer the question was never captured. And here is what makes that dangerous rather than merely annoying: the report produces a number anyway. You will build a Reporting-Ready Process Specification. The lab saves your progress in your browser.
Start with a broken answer
Start With the Question the Report Must Answer
Chapter 1 of 8 · 12 min
The learning path
Nothing in this guide builds a report. All of it happens upstream, in the process, while the work is still being done, because by the time somebody asks the question the chance to record the answer has usually gone.
The foundation
- 01Start With the Question the Report Must AnswerWrite the question, and name the decision a different answer would change.12 min · exercise
- 02Define Clear StatusesEvery record gets exactly one status, and every status means one thing.12 min · exercise
- 03Capture Milestone DatesEvery date a report needs has a stated capture rule and a backfill that cannot make things worse.14 min · exercise
What makes it durable
- 04Preserve Decisions and HistoryDecide what gets appended and what gets replaced, and tag every entry with what caused it.14 min · exercise
- 05Define the Reporting PopulationState who is in, who is out, and what counts as the event being measured.12 min · exercise
- 06Name the Owner and Source of Each MetricOne owner and one source of truth per metric, with the definition travelling alongside.12 min · exercise
- 07Handle Unknown, Missing, and Failed StatesThree different absences, represented three different ways, so none of them reads as zero.14 min · exercise
- 08Capstone: Make a Workflow ReportableAsk four real questions of the whole specification, validate it, and approve version 1.0.15 min · exercise