Reporting in the workplace - was your journey really necessary?

There is a danger in having a day when you have been questioning the basis of much of the information that is used to measure performance (notice that I don't use the word challenge). Today has been that sort of day.

A volunteer has been sought within my team to carry out something called 'Workplace Assessment' and, whilst I would normally been sceptical at best, I had cause to want to do something that might raise my profile a little. What better for a numerate and philosophical bureaucrat than a monitoring and reporting function?

The idea is that, in the writing of a monthly report, you establish your pace of travel towards the designated targets, consider what barriers might get in the way and what might be done to circumvent them, as well as what changes might be made to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

It was only when I read the reports already prepared by others that I realised that such a tool is only as good as its relevance. And, from a personal perspective, I didn't see that it was designed to actually allow much analysis by anyone else other than the person who had access to the core data. So, what would I want to know if I wanted to engage in the problem solving activities within the group?

First, I would want to know what the direction of travel was. Were we getting closer to our target or further from it? You need comparatives for that, rather than a snapshot, so add the previous month's data. But even that lacks something, as the target is a linear one, presuming that you will make steady progress towards the target, rather than putting the snapshots into context by comparison with historic data. So, historic data might be helpful.

What are the underpinning assumptions that go towards designating the target and, if they aren't being achieved, what adjustments can be made to make good the divergence? Do you need to do more than the expected norm, and how might you achieve that?

You might see what I'm getting at here - can management information be used to actually facilitate change, rather than explaining your failures?

So, I started off with a simple but possibly irrelevant task. Now, I have lots of questions and a deep and abiding philosophical concern that it might become complicated but definitely relevant.

Bureaucracy, it's much more complex than it seems...