How to provide value without compromise — a.k.a. banning TPS Reports
I hate “busy work”!
Really hate doing something and putting it out there just because you need to show that you’re doing something…
Not only that, I’ve always resented those people that put out a lot of stuff that is pure garbage just because they need to show just how busy they have been working on and publishing garbage… all in the hope someone will recognize and gain some value from it that was never the intent of the person putting it out.
You know who I’m talking about — there are people right now in your workplace who are super anxious about their standing and security in their job that really feel like the more garbage reporting and statistics they publish, the more valuable they appear to be — even if they dont really know what the stuff they are publishing is supposed to be communicating.
I mean, shit — this behavior has gotten people through an entire lifetime in their education and careers. Peers jockeying for the all elusive “visibility” in competing with you and others so that they can get the higher review score that results in a promotion with salary increase/bonus/stocks — and added responsibilities that they are now even more anxious about and start to churn out even more meaningless pure bullshit reporting than they did before. And not only that, they will pressure their new subordinates to also generate garbage that will not only be read but now expected by those above them in the chain who are also generating garbage for unsuspecting consumption.
What does this have to do with you? Well, I’ll tell you…
Stop creating and then force feeding your department worthless bullshit reports. You know you do it — stop now!
Take a look above and tell me you dont recognize shit emails that have graphs and charts that look EXACTLY like these? Then tell me you haven’t done this yourself…?
Look, we all do it on occasion — we generate something with a lot of lines, tables, columnar graphs, mean floating averages, median value projections, etc… without knowing enough about them to even be able to explain it to anyone around you. The more colors and colored lines you use, the more important and relevant they appear to be. After all — why would you waste your valuable time generating this stuff if it didn’t lead to something actionable that resulted in a return value that was 10x of the time you invested into this?
Here’s an article on a popular job resource site that discusses this in detail.
Now, what I’m going to suggest is going to require you to put more into what you will be reporting on, publishing, etc… You *can* think about what it is that is lacking information wise that will contribute to filling a gap in the organization. You *can* spend the neural horsepower to find the gaps and determine the potential of data to fill the gaps in knowledge and contribute to an increase in productivity and ultimately revenue. And then you *can* spend the time to isolate the dataset that communicates either for or against your hypothesis — ultimately being a scientist in your methods will derive value where everyone else is just publishing noise that means nothing.
Be deliberate in your efforts. You can review data and build these exploratory graphs and charts yourself to identify patterns that you then refine and provide value to the wider audience. Just don’t spend your and everyone else’s precious time publishing and then having everyone else try to derive value that was unintentional.
Dont allow your work to be misinterpreted and define policy that will ultimately fail everyone in the end. And most importantly — don’t screw up your career looking like an idiot because you can’t actually give a plausible analysis of the report that you assembled from unrelated Lego blocks…