The conversation I have a lot
“Do you have any trouble with people filling in timesheets?” “No.” I pause and make sure I’ve heard what I think was said. The answer is never no.
“Hmm,” I said. “Yes, they know to fill it in; I’ve drilled it into them,” the founder said.
The conversation about timesheets happens a lot with the founders I speak to. For most of them, their team is the product. This founder had certainly found a way of making sure that timesheets were always filled in, but drilled in isn’t really designed in. It depended on him continuing to crack the whip.
Drilled in isn’t designed in
What happens when things are not normal? People off sick, people on holiday, people having a bad week. New person joins. It’s not really a system; it’s a habit, or “this is the way things work around here,” which does sometimes change.
The missing layer
What often gets missed when people are designing these systems - or should I say evolving these systems, because often they take shape over time - is the data layer. The data layer is how data flows through the system, how it just moves without people typing it anywhere. It’s how the system collects information as it goes along as people do their work. The timestamps it takes and the updates it take note of. It happens in the background.
The thing that always reminds me of is your mum tidying the house before you got home from school. You never ever noticed it happening, but if it didn’t happen, you absolutely did notice it. And you (unhelpfully) said “its a lot messier than usual”. Being a mum myself, I can feel how hurtful this must have been (sorry mum).
What it feels like when it’s missing
When that data layer doesn’t exist, you can’t see it in the system, but you can feel it. The Monday morning meeting is more of a “let’s fill in the numbers as people talk” meeting or a “people guessing what’s happening” meeting. Reporting is someone’s job; it takes two hours to pull, and people have to type stuff in. People have to chase stuff.
Report building is an activity category and requires a huge amount of work that to take place. Or it doesn’t - and the founder just knows which projects are going well or badly because they can feel it, but everything is always out of date. It is never just there.
What it feels like when it’s there
But when it is just there, you ask a question and the answer just exists. You want the report and you just open it; nobody builds it; you don’t have to ask anyone or tell anyone. And the team obviously knows that data is being captured, but they don’t feel it, they don’t see it, they don’t need to know about it.
Your time goes into interpreting data, not collecting it.
The test
The easiest way to know if you do or don’t have a data layer is: are you spending more time pulling numbers than discussing what they mean? If yes, you’ve got that layer missing.
Back to the founder
The founder that I opened this newsletter with had found a reasonable solution. They were getting the information that they want; the team were truly updating it; they had impressive reports that I saw, and they could absolutely use the data to run their business effectively. They weren’t doing anything wrong; in fact, I was actually impressed with how up to date their reporting was, but they could solve this problem in another way.
You don’t need people to care more about data or worry about adhering to protocol. You don’t need reporting to be a drag on anyone or a drag on your brain capacity of continuing to crack the whip. If the data layer exists, reporting can just happen.
The reporting becomes a feature of the landscape rather than a building to be constructed every single time.