A lot of good reporting user interfaces have what’s called the suffix and prefix property. They can be attached to any report you save. So that may be something that you could add. And allow users to access archived reports to export them as needed so current reports, but there should also be perhaps a listing of archived reports, perhaps someone must look at things historically.
And here’s a quick bit on printing. Would this work on paper? So when you are actually developing a report, ensure that the same information is included in all formats. So don’t include information in one printable format and not in the other, it should be consistent across the board. And again, with regards to working on paper, just make sure that you are following the guidelines set forth by organization whether it's 8.5x11. Perhaps there's a long report format that you have standardized on, but work within that. And again going back to color coding, colors alone should not contain any information because more times than not people are going to be printing black and white. So keep that in mind.
So as you can see, these key areas that we have gone through can all incorporate best practices for report writing. We have discussed a few of them today. Perhaps some of these may add value in your reporting practices moving forward, but I think that a lot of us will agree on this. Ultimately these are what I feel are the main challenges that a data analyst or business analyst actually faces. We have talked about this early on but requirements, understanding the true stakeholder’s needs or the stakeholder’s true needs, is really key in this.
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Unless you know the stakeholder’s true needs, any of these other aspects of the reporting lifecycle are going to be for naught. Data mining, or digging through vast quantities of data to find the required information, you could almost say that this is somewhat intertwined with query design because to mine data you may be using the SQL language to extract that needed data. But it is a very tough task. It’s complicated, and we are also dealing with several platforms so that always makes it tough, just trying to get the right data to solve the right questions.
Let’s review what we talked about in terms of functionality: You can see here the top points: making the report flexible and feature-rich for the user while remaining concise and well organized. So our functional consideration is a big challenge for you as a business analyst.
In terms of formatting, giving stakeholders the data they need in an actionable format could be complicated. There are number of different formats. This is often in the eye of the beholder, but you have to take it into consideration.
And then finally distribution, getting the reports to the end-user in a timely manner and in the right location. Some of this distribution can indeed be manual. So not only do you want automation in this process, but you want it to be something that’s very ubiquitous so a reporting solution should be distribute to a lot of different types of media. So what I would like to do now is take a poll question. Which of the following do you find the most challenging? Let me go ahead and put this poll question up.
So which of these do you find most challenging as a business analyst, is it A) requirements, B) data mining and query design, is it C) functional considerations, is it D) information design or formatting, or is it E) the distribution. Now I could have added up a letter F there and said write in your own answer, it would be interesting to see what other folks have to say but hopefully these five challenges kind of cover the spectrum pretty well.
Now looking at the amount of votes that have come in, so far 60% have come in, and I would say the majority of the groups consider requirements to be the biggest challenge and I am not surprised. Query design and mining seems to be the second most, the second biggest challenge or a challenge that second majority I would say 26% of the group here feels. So we will just give another moment or so but you also see here that third on the list was information design and formatting as well.
Alright. Well thank you guys, I really appreciate you guys participating in this poll. I am going to go ahead and close the poll at this moment, giving it just another moment or so, another couple more votes trickle in. Alright, let's go ahead and close this poll. But it looks like 51% of the folks on this audience feel that requirements is the biggest challenge, 27% mining/query design, 12% information design and formatting. I really appreciate your guys’ feedback there. And there are the poll results, you guys can go ahead and have a look.