Making a Statement

While Metrics make my heart go pitter patter, I have to admit, they are not everyone's cup of tea.  It unlikely that very many people will be excited by a 100+ report on an organization's performance.  However, recording performance is not very effective if no one reads it. 

So, how do you make looking at reports more appealing?  Enter my friend, the infographic.  Infographics can help in a variety of different ways.  First, they help create context.  It's very hard to look at a large list of numbers and know how they compare.  Making a visual gives quick understanding and will be a lot easier to get the people who need to look at the numbers, look at the numbers.

Next, it's unlikely in today's busy world that someone is going to have time to sit down and read a novel on performance.  Making information faster to digest will make it more likely the reader will make it to the end.  Most will not even start if confronted with solid text and pages of table.

It can be hard to take the time after spending hours and hours gathering data to make it look attractive.  However, there has been a large proliferation of inforgraphic programs that are web based that do not take a graphic's art degree or a significant investment in time.  I tried out Piktochart and found it very easy to use.  It certainly makes a better report front page than anything I could have made in Word with the same amount of time.

Just look at it...

It's so much more inviting than a plain white background word document.  It certainly has a leg up on the clasic APA title page.  I invite you to give Piktochart a try.  It's a fun program and may even get more people to read your hard work!

Not an All Access Pass

I spend a lot of time creating metrics that measure our performance.  An important part of that task is looking at data and how it's entered.  Awhile back we had a log that was created in Excel that would show which items we had received and when.  At first, using Excel seemed to work ok.  However, there were some significant problems.

1.)Multiple users could not log on at once.  We would spend the afternoon calling each other to find out who had the spreadsheet open and have to ask people to close it.  If someone left on vacation or was sick and had the spreadsheet open, it meant we either had to create a new copy or wait until that person got back.  Not a great way to do work.

2.)Data integrity became questionable...fast.  We had people who did not understand how to appropriately sort data try to look for a name, and only sort with the name field.  Pretty soon we had no idea which line belonged to which.  We could no longer have an confidence in recorded issues being listed on the correct record.

With these issues, my management asked me for some ideas.  We did not have any funding, and what I was going to create needed to be user friendly and was going to be created by me, who is not a programmer.  A large stack of Access books later and a 30+ hours of youtube videos later, I built our group an Access database that has managed a lot of our issues.

The video linked below shows one of the first actions I took with our brand new database, and that was to create form entry and to hide the data sheets from view.  This is not the database I created, but is similar in design.  I hope this helps get you started if you decide to start using Access for data entry.

Say Um....

Back in 2007, my sister and I loved reading books and blogs by our favorite author, The Yarn Harlot.  She loved to knit, and I loved to spin.  We decided to start a yarn and fiber business and we created a Podcast called The Sassy Sheep.  At this time, podcasts had just become popular.  Finding new content was pretty challenging.  We listened to a lot of other podcasts to learn about trends, and sometimes this would give us a direction to go in. However, we enjoyed our sessions the best when we got to do interviews.

One interview sticks out the most in our minds and changed how to did business.  We had been dying yarn in the microwave.  You need heat to set acid dyes.  It is a very cumbersome way to dye and it took us an entire day to make ten skeins of yarn.  There is quite a famous dyer of yarn in Montana called Mountain Colors and they actually decided to let my sister and I interview them and tour their facility. 

These ladies are some of the most amazing women I have ever met.  They decided to create their business model to allow other women to be able to love working and still have time for their family.  They created an environment that allowed for completely flexible hours and even found ways to have tasks that people who worked from home could do.  There was a set of workers that would pick up the just dyed yarn, dry it in their homes and package it for sale.  I watched a large group of very busy people focused on work, but every single person had the most amazing smile on their face.  This company was important to them. 

My poor sister always had to do the audio editing whenever we were done.  Normally, she would drag her feet.  Until you do editing of your audio, you will never know how many times you repeat words and phrases.  One time she called me after a particularly wandering podcast and informed me I had "um" over 40 times.  I am not sure that I will ever make another podcast, and am almost certain the ones we made have been lost to the internet forever, but the chance to meet the ladies and other people while doing was a life changing event.  Meeting people who know the industry and can act as mentors can completely change your perspective and outlook.

Here Comes the Sun

Last week I got to play with a new tool, Jing.  This is a great free tool (there is also a premium tool available) that does screen capture.  I was unfamiliar with it until last week and now might be mildly obsessed.  I even put in a call to our IT department to see if I could convince them to allow me to download it.  (Unfortunately, the answer was no, darn the luck!)

Why do I love Jing?  It's a fantastic tool to show people EXACTLY what they need to do to make something work.  I used both the screen capture to make a stagnant picture and utilized the tool to record a video.  It did take me a couple of tries to make a good video, but it was very intuitive to use and worth the download space on my computer.  Recently I was trying to create some forms and macros in Access and used a lot of YouTube videos to figure out how to create these items.  I can't remember the last time I tried to read a computer book to do something like this.  My rate of success to try and learn something new with a video is so much more than a book.

Give Jing a try!  Here is a link.  I urge you to go try this tool.  There are some drawbacks as I was unable to upload the video directly into my blog last week and it does use flash.  However, it's a very easy to use tool the next time your friend wants to know how you made that awesome form in Access!