7 New Year's Resolutions for Reporting Teams

2020 has been a challenging year with everyone relying on their resilience to make it through and survive during this pandemic. With 2021 coming to a start, it is a good time to start reflecting on future business objectives leading to more prosperous results.

For the start of this New Year, here are seven resolutions for reporting teams that will hopefully make 2021 a stronger year with a more rewarding business establishment. 

1-    Tell a story with your data 

Storytelling has become a famous concept whenever a team is producing a data visualization tool. But sometimes your team will get caught into the numbers and deadlines and will forget to make sense out of the data. It really is about making a long story short while providing the needed insights for a higher performance. For instance, using historical data and time periods, contrasting different KPI and metrics against each other will allow your reports to be more actionable, aligned, and connected so that the user will get the message needed and act upon it.

2-    Engage users frequently 

Keeping the audience needs at the forefront of your work while understanding their priorities and preferences is key. Playing a guiding and ushering role would result in a more engaged users through the process of choosing the right KPI, for example. Engaged users are surely to come back for more or will share and refer your services with others which in return will lead to a higher adoption of reporting solutions. In addition, your users expect an effective and simple interface that satisfies their needs. Therefore, improving your report’s usability combined with an interactive design will allow the user to discover the value provided. Users’ retention could be maintained by sharing updates, changes to help them stay informed without the risk of losing them. 

3-    Learn new tools 

Reporting is about empowering others by delivering interactive and actionable information to make better decisions. That is why this year consider prioritizing your personal development by learning new tools that will elevate the way you manage data. Such tools include Python, exploratory data analysis, data visualizations tools such as Tableau, Power BI, Qlik. It is best if the reporting and healthcare business intelligence tools fit into your users’ strategic business goals and satisfy your needs to create meaningful solutions with actionable insights.

         4-    Benefit from predictive analytics 

The best practice for the science of predictive analytics is leveraging existing predictive models from your vendor, customizing it to your environment, population, or customer needs and operationalizing it to improve the outcome of your population. You can deploy your predictive capabilities by extracting forward-looking insights in your enterprise in the following: unplanned readmission rates, deterioration index, risk scoring for chronic diseases, population health and so on. The use of these models enables your clients to be one step-ahead in potential events that might occur. 

5-    Document all reports

Documentation is often praised but rarely done. It takes additional time after completing much needed reports and getting ready to focus on the next wave of requests. But, good documentation is insurance for saving time on the not-so-rare occasions when a report needs to be modified or troubleshot. 

In the absence of good documentation, reporting teams may have to leverage knowledge sharing sessions to disseminate report-specific information. This is an avoidable consumption of time. Documentation will lead to a higher efficiency as you are providing information about business rules, functions, calculations or a stored procedure in a reusable and easy-to-reference manner. It is also a great tool to explain the why behind the steps taken in a query or code and this will lead to a better understanding for other developers who might be asked to support your work.  

6-    Perform peer reviews 

Peer reviews is nothing but a second set of eyes when it comes to code/query optimization. A developer who carefully reviews his work before submitting it to others and validates his codes, queries, and results is assuring an evidence-based process. Encouraging your team to perform a peer review will allow you to find costly bugs before running your queries officially. Getting feedback about a specific work is a win-win situation since common learning can be established and more efficient reports will be created. 

       7-    Celebrate and advertise wins 

The last resolution that you can consider as a reporting team is to recognize major achievements and share them within the organization. Don’t just keep working and moving to the next request. Promoting your message and showing how you are contributing to the organization is a must. Celebrating by sharing your achievements inside and outside your organization as appropriate.

We hope the resolutions that we provided above will inspire you and your reporting team to make an even greater impact on your organization this year.

Jean-Luc Coquerel