The Six-Month Sprint

I am sure many of you, like me, have spent at least some time in your professional careers preparing long-range business forecasts of some kind. Whether they were for financial metrics like revenue, margins or cash flow; operational metrics like market share, customer count, or inventory; or even human capital measures like future headcount needs, impacts on profitablilty of future salary adjustments, or long-term benefits cost trends - it is safe to say that at lease some kind of future-focused planning is a long-accepted fact of business.

And while the necessity and value of planning, to be able to effectively assess current baseline data and results, fold in business objectives, sprinkle in competitive challenges, add a dash of environmental and cultural factors, and we typically realize that even our well-reasoned, clearly articulated, and thoroughly documented plans and forecasts often fail to accurately predict and ultimately reflect what actually happens.

It is the old line about military battle plans - 'No battle plan survives its first contact with the enemy'.

And so it is with most business plans and long-range forecasts as well. Your plans don't exist in a vacuum - the competition has its own plans, that big customer that counts for 32% of this year's revenue forecast may go belly up, or at least squeeze you on price, 'star' employees that you think are slated to move into really important roles may leave. As with most planning processes, the second you hit 'print', it is likely something or some assumption that underlies the plans themselves has changed.

The recommendation certainly is to not stop planning, to simply toss up your hands and give up, since the business and economy are moving so fast for anyone to really successfully plan for, but rather to be a little more reasonable about not only your ability to accurately (and reasonably) assess and predict the future. Spending too much time on 5-year plans of dubious merit is not normally a solid use of time.

I recently read an interesting piece on the Co.Design blog called, 'How Can You Strategize For the Future, When You Can't See Beyond 18-Months?',  that suggests for design firms, (and I am sort of extrapolating this to those of us that do Human Capital and workforce planning of any type), that it is really impossible to plan out a design strategy any farther out than 18 months. In fact, the author suggests - 'Beyond 18 Months, the future is anybody's guess'. The world, the markets, technology - these factors and others simply move too quickly today.

Not sure you agree with the '18 Months' figure? Let me ask you then, have you in your organization, or even in your personal and professional life spent time working out your iPad strategy? About how long has the iPad been out? And even just as it was coming out, did anyone, (besides Apple), have a clue about how transformative the device would be?

The last point I wanted to mention from the CoDesign piece was the idea of something called 'The Six-Month Sprint' - a process where development and design processes, (mindful of the long term planning horizon limitation of 18 months), are collapsed into six-month cycles. Sure, for typical firms and products this is a tight window, and mistakes and tradeoffs have to be made, but in the opinion of the author, these shorter planning and development cycles are simply the only sensible and practical reaction to a business climate that increasingly defies prediction.

So my question to you is - How far out into the future do you attempt to plan for things like headcount numbers, labor costs, workforce mix, organizational capability needs, hiring plans, etc.?

And, if your planning horizon is longer than say 18 months, how confident are you in the accuracy of those plans?

Is long-term planning really a thing of the past, a relic of a simpler, and lost forever age?

Making Data Come Alive

Yes, this is yet another 'sports' post. Kind of. Actually it is another in the occasional series of posts centered around innovative presentations of information -examples that highlight ways where a variety of organizations have managed to move beyond the expected and routine - 'Look, sales trends for the last 5 years in a bar chart!', to create interesting, engaging, and increasingly interactive tools that really transform both the data and the user experience. One of the best signs that a data presentation tool is effective is not just the initial reaction from users, but rather that the tool or technology makes users want to learn more, see more, and continue to engage with the solution.Patrick working the analytics

I came across such a solution this past weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY. On Saturday the museum unveiled a brand new exhibit - One for the Books: Baseball Records and the Stories Behind Them. The new exhibit tells the story baseball's most cherished statistics and records through more than 200 artifacts in the most technologically advanced presentation in the Museum's history. 

Any fan, or casual observer of baseball knows that numbers, stats, records, etc. are as much a part of the game's history as the players themselves. Iconic records like Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak, Cy Young's 511 career pitching victories, and Ted Williams .406 batting average can be cited easily by baseball aficionados. Baseball is truly a numbers game - no other sport, (and few other businesses I bet), measure, track, analyze, and report statistical information about the games at the level of detail that major league baseball does.

But raw statistics, be they describing normal business or workforce data, or even the data produced by such a compelling an activity as baseball, can still fall flat, feel one-dimensional, and fail to completely tell the story buried in the figures if the presentation and interface for interaction with said data is mundane, fully expected, and one-way. Tools that not only present the raw numbers, but allow the user to not only choose the data they want to see, but to also experience the data and really engage with it are the future of information presentation.

Case in point the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's new 'Top 10 Tower' interactive information display at the new 'One For the Books' exhibit. The Top 10 Tower, in true iPad-like fashion, is a touch activated series of screens and displays that allow the baseball fan to learn about some of the classic and lesser-known statistical history of the game.  By selecting variables such as Pitching or Batting, choosing specific focus areas to drill into, and using a cool 'timeline' slider to see how the results and records have moved over time, the Top10 Tower created a fully immersive and engaging interactive presentation of what are really 'just' numbers.

Make selections on the lower display of the tower, and the large video screens on the upper section automatically update, showing not only figures and images, but also allowing touch access to additional multi-media content about the record holder, of the timeframe the recored was established. The Top 10 tower also presents data in different dimensions, even ones not expressly requested by user, as the designers of the tool know that context matters in the review and analysis of baseball statistics, as it is likely equally important in the business and workforce metrics we produce and review all the time.

I know what you are saying, the Top 10 tower is really just a fancy way to present some simple lists, and it really is not a big deal, and certainly has no meaning to the business world that has to be concerned with 'real' data, not just batting averages.

Sure, keep telling yourself that. Your data is important, and baseball is just a game. 

Have any idea with the batting average of your hiring managers is? For this season? For all-time?