It’s that time on the calendar. Quarterly board meetings are in full swing. In many companies, this means departmental productivity is interrupted by the need for information. Every department gets its request for data, and the executive team begins building the story.
Consider the time invested, and the disruption associated with each quarterly meeting. There are weeks of back-and-forth meetings. And when financials are weak, the pressure on each department increases drastically, followed by cross-departmental interrogations.
Of course, financials are the key metric, usually followed by sales pipeline reports. These are the barometer for company health.
If financials and sales activity equate to the key barometer, what’s the need for other departmental information – operations, product development, marketing, human resources?
The answer – “each department’s data and tasks directly affect the company’s health.”
This is certainly the correct answer, but it’s often lip service. If the financials look good, many departmental metrics become secondary. However, if the financials are not meeting expectations, everyone’s looking for departmental answers.
Two words have become part of the daily business vocabulary – agile and pivot. Conceptually, these are immensely important in today’s constantly changing business landscape. A business must be agile enough to pivot when the timing is right. The challenges are data integration, and more importantly, organizational commitment. There are plenty of technological tools available. What’s often missing is a well-constructed methodology that combines data with a no-BS approach to identifying underlying business factors.
Instead of the 90-day grind associated with board meetings, wouldn’t it be much more effective to have continuous, cross-departmental visibility needed to appropriately adjust business activities?
