Eight(8) wasteful data tasks your team might be doing that ruins their professional growth

Nothing sucks in career space than a daily routine that has no value at the end. Other than earning you the paycheck…

As a coach, I have been providing workplace coaching focusing on evolving competencies for the 21st Century professional and the future workplace both through one on one sessions or career growth accelerator clinics. In this edition I will focus on some data related tasks you will find ruining career and professional growth among many professionals at the workplace today. Feel free to share within your network?

25% ”  … time spent daily on repetitive and low-value data tasks by many professionals at the workplace today (Redundant tasks)

…I wish I had discovered these tricks five (5) years ago, my career growth would have been unlocked early… This is common feedback I often receive every week from my workplace coaching engagements on a signature program i run dubbed Data and Analytics Coaching. From my interactions, professionals continue to undertake daily wasteful tasks that ruin their career and professional growth: I witnessed this daily for over 12years in the corporate workplace. Am sure you will relate with them.

Top wasteful data-related tasks in the workplace today:

  1. Monthly reports – Too many professionals, the last week of every month is a “!!!We are closed for monthly reporting” season….. Very little time is spent in interpreting these reports to gain actionable insights that may drive business improvement or innovation. Why not get to real-time reporting using an interactive KPI Reportindashboard?
  2. Data reconciliations – The reason you are reconciling and matching entries implies that data was already captured previously and thus this is rework. I have seen organizations where reconciliation is a full resourced department with a Head of Data Reconciliation function. The work they do is mostly matching payment entries from the payment channels such as Banks, Mobile Platforms, CRMs etc. Why not get data right upfront? Why not empower the client to make payment while quoting a reference to their service paid for or then onboard them onto a self-service wallet with all their onboarding data? There is everything wrong with the Customer Journey mapping.
  3. Data downloads and consolidations  – Many organizations store data in various sources including ERP, Line of Business Systems, Excel etc…. A routine with many professionals is downloading such data from various sources than for analysis and reporting. Modern Business Intelligence tools such as Tableau, iDashboards, Power BI can replace this routine by providing real-time reporting through the host to host data connection.
  4. Data Cleansing and formatting –Due to poor data modelling skills, many organizations are struggling with data integrity issues and thus reporting takes over one(1) month to design. Proactive data validation standards embedded at the data capture process would fix this challenge upfront. This must be accompanied by a robust organization-wide data governance framework which should be mainstreamed as part of the Total Quality Management Strategy.
  5. Emailing data-driven statements and reports – After summarizing data drive reports such as statements, customer queries, many professionals would then email such outputs as attachments manually to respective recipients.  This is a process than can be automated through simple macros or other AI-driven solutions.
  6. Converting documents to data – Many organizations who initially collect data through physical forms will take over two(2) months to have this data converted to data or even capture only the basic details. This includes customer application forms when on-boarding a client. This denied the organization leveraging from the BIG DATA advantage to drive insights. Further, the time lag in data capture pauses an operational risk for real-time decision making.
  7. Populating Duplicated data sources – Capturing the same details at every stage of an operational business process is common practice with many organizations. Mostly this is done unconsciously since several roles may be involved in a process. A detailed Work Motion Study (Process and Task Analysis) would be helpful in surfacing up such duplication so that there is a consolidate single point of data capture.
  8. Departmental meetings – I had to sneak this one here though may not be solely data related…. Meetings with no milestones and accountabilities attached is a wasteful task within the organization. I have always enforced to define a meeting ROI (Return On Investment) beforehand e.g Decisions to make, KPIs to track etc

How you can get rid of these wastages

As your transformational and growth partner, InQuest Research & Consulting provides practical and innovative solutions that address items 1 to 7 wasteful tasks above through various services.

Do not miss out on our upcoming April 2019 Saturday edition of our signature program Advanced MS Excel and Power BI and grab either a super early bird or regular early bird offer.

Also check out our 2019 annual calendar of open workshops, seminars, regional summits and open classes through this link: Annual 2019 Calendar.

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