A Monthly Number You Actually Act On

The missing half of every report

Reports contain numbers and comparisons, and almost none contain what happens if the number moves.

So a figure falls, somebody notices, there is a conversation, and nothing follows because no response had been decided.

The following month the same figure is looked at again with the same result.

Attaching a decision in advance is what turns a monthly reading into something that changes the business.

Write the pair, not the number

• The number.
• The range considered normal.
• What happens if it falls below.
• What happens if it rises above.
• Who does it.

Five lines, written once, and thereafter the monthly reading is a check rather than a discussion. The fourth is skipped almost universally, which is why nobody ever does anything different in a good month.

Decide the response before you look

Which is the discipline that makes this work.

A response chosen while looking at a bad figure is chosen under pressure and is usually reactive.

The same response chosen in advance, calmly, is nearly always more proportionate and frequently is to do nothing for another month.

Deciding in advance also means the response is agreed rather than argued about at the moment somebody is anxious.

Write it down when the number is ordinary, which is the only time you can think clearly about it.

Then follow it, which is the other half and is harder.

A worked example

A business watched enquiries monthly and reacted to every dip, changing something each time.

They wrote it down instead: normal is eight to fourteen; below eight for two consecutive months, check the form and read the last twenty enquiries; above fourteen for two months, look at whether the response time is holding.

Over the following year the alert condition was met once, and the check found nothing wrong, which was itself useful.

The high condition was met twice and revealed that reply times had slipped during the busy period.

Neither finding would have emerged from the previous arrangement of reacting monthly.

The change was writing four lines.

Two consecutive months, not one

Which is the threshold that fits small numbers.

A single month below the range is ordinary variation for any business with fewer than about fifty enquiries a month.

Two consecutive months is a signal, and it costs one month of delay to avoid a great many false alarms.

That rule alone prevents most of the reactive changes that make a business's own figures unreadable.

Where something genuinely urgent breaks, the alerts catch it within days rather than waiting for the monthly reading.

So the monthly number can afford to be patient precisely because something else is impatient.

The action has to be specific

Since a vague one is the same as none.

Investigate is not an action; check the form, read the last twenty enquiries, and look at what changed on the site in the previous six weeks are.

Improve the site is not an action; rewrite the service page that produces the most enquiries is.

Write it at the level somebody could do on a Tuesday morning without asking what was meant.

And name who, since an action belonging to everybody belongs to nobody.

Include a do-nothing condition

Which is the most useful line and the one nobody writes.

State explicitly that within the normal range, nothing happens and nothing is discussed.

That gives permission not to react, which is what people actually need in order to stop.

Without it, an ordinary month still produces a conversation about whether the number is quite where it should be.

Nine months of doing nothing deliberately is a successful year of reporting.

Review the pairs annually

Rather than the numbers.

Once a year, look at whether each threshold was ever crossed and whether the stated action was taken.

A threshold never crossed in two years is set wrongly or measures something stable.

An action never taken when the threshold was crossed means the pair is decorative and should be removed or rewritten.

That review is what stops this becoming another document nobody follows.

Report the action, not just the number

A small change to how the monthly note is written that makes the whole thing visible.

Rather than recording eleven enquiries, record eleven enquiries, within range, no action, alongside the date.

Twelve of those lines is a record of decisions rather than of readings, and it shows at a glance how many months produced an action.

Where a year produced none, that is worth knowing: either the business is stable or the thresholds are set too wide to ever fire.

Where it produced five, the thresholds are too narrow and the reacting has simply been formalised rather than reduced.

One number is enough to start

Since the temptation is to write pairs for eight figures and abandon the whole thing by March.

Pick the single number the business actually runs on, write its five lines, and use it for a year before adding a second.

A business with one number it genuinely acts on is in a considerably better position than one with eight it reviews and ignores.

The second pair, if it comes, will be better written for having watched the first one work.

And in most small businesses the first pair turns out to be sufficient, which is the outcome worth hoping for rather than resisting.

The counter-case

Some numbers are worth watching without a trigger.

A long-term trend is informative even when no single month warrants action, and requiring a response to everything discourages watching anything.

Rigid thresholds also miss the case where a figure is technically normal and something is obviously wrong.

And judgement should not be entirely replaced by a rule.

Write the normal range and the two responses beside your one number, require two consecutive months, and state explicitly that nothing happens in between.

The five lines

1. Name the number.
2. State the normal range.
3. Write the low response.
4. Write the high response.
5. Require two months.
6. Say nothing happens in between.
7. Name who acts.

Step six is what makes the rest hold, since without written permission to do nothing an ordinary month still produces a conversation and eventually a change.

Cutting the rest of the report is covered in vanity numbers in a monthly report.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.