You produce operations reports every month and email them as required to your management group.

What percentage of managers actually read them?

Prove it.

The Email Marketing industry has developed sophisticated tools for measuring the success of email campaigns.  You can see who opens the email, who downloads the attachment and when they do it.  (BTW, only about one in about 12,500,000 junk mails results in a sale – 0.000008% response rate)

Have you ever considered using this technology for monitoring the performance of your reports?  What might it reveal about the usage patterns of the end users?

What sort of benefit could this information have when it’s time for the meeting to discuss the numbers?  Maybe Mr.Grumpys’ tirade would be cut short if it was known he hadn’t even read the reports.

There’s more at stake than just compliance and fear-based coercion though.  It’s about understanding what’s important so that the information being provided has meaning.  If no one is opening your reports, maybe they don’t find them useful.  Maybe that’s the real issue.

Of course, reading a report isn’t the end of the story.  It’s the beginning, the foundation.  Reports provide a focal point for management meetings.  The content and presentation of the report will influence the discussion so you want to be aware of the direction your reports send the discussion.

If your reports point to trivial matters beyond anyone’s control, they will spend time hand-wringing about trivial matters beyond anyone’s control.  If your reports point to the drivers of the business, the time is likely going to be more well-spent.

I am convinced that it’s a good idea to gather metrics on report usage.  If a manager only takes a passing glance at the numbers every three months, it’s worth asking the question, “why”?  There’s plenty of intelligence that can be gained by looking at the usage patterns; lots of possibilities to think about.  Maybe by the time the reports are available, they are already out of date.

Now what if you could measure the entire usage cycle of your reports.  In Saas applications like Salesforce.com, like ours, each user leaves a history.  Perhaps the unintended consequence of software-as-a-service, or cloud computing as it’s sometimes called, is that every second of every page view is collected and available for analysis.

Here’s an opportunity to find out exactly how your reports are being consumed.  Use this knowledge to ask specific questions of the users gaining insight as to what they believe is RELEVANT.  You’ll know it’s relevant when everyone agrees the process is worth the time and effort.

Much better than just sending an email out into the darkness, vanishing like a cry into the night, never to be seen or heard from again.

So that this:

“Hey Bob, did you get my email?”

becomes this:

“Hey Bob, I noticed that you only ever view the Revenue per Employee Report.  What is it about that report that makes it so meaningful?  What is it about that inter-relationship that provides a basis for your decision making?”

I encourage taking the academic view on this process; using it to learn, collaborate, and grow.  Rather than the disciplinary view; using it to browbeat and punish.  But hey, I can’t tell you how to live.

Enjoy.