Five mistakes teams make with reporting latency

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit reporting latency.

Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be
• Real-time costs several times more than hourly
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Most decisions do not need same-minute data. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Turning this into a decision

What this looks like day to day

Data outlives the applications built on top of it, which is why the model deserves more thought than the screens. Three things worth confirming about reporting latency before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Most decisions do not need same-minute data — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.