ClearPoint's Easy Update Process

Do you find yourself dreading the monthly email sitting in your inbox about “updating your data”? You try to go into the shared spreadsheet to make updates, and somebody else is already there. You close the sheet knowing the last time multiple people made updates at the same time, your changes weren’t saved. When you finally do get a chance to make your updates, it takes forever to get the data formatted correctly. To top it off, you must craft an email to your supervisor explaining what your data means since it’s out of context in the spreadsheet.

Your reporting manager hates the process also. Instead of spending their time planning how to achieve results, they are stuck sending reminder emails, asking people to make updates, or even just gathering the data themselves. Remote work makes it even more difficult to track down employees, and they’re always worried about the accuracy of the data. The manual process feels too complicated. They’re bogged down and wasting hours of their time.

If these situations sound familiar, you’ve found yourself in Excel Hell. We hear about it every day. 89 hours are wasted monthly trying to pull together a report, and 92% of individuals believe Excel is simply too time-consuming to build reports [1]. There must be a better way, right?

Whether you’re a monthly contributor providing data or an administrator managing the process, ClearPoint helps make your day-to-day easier. Monthly contributors make updates in one place, and administrators have a one-page view that summarizes the elements that need updated and who is responsible for the updates.

Sound too good to be true? We’ve seen it before with our customers! Take one customer for example: A pharmaceutical organization we worked with implemented ClearPoint and transformed their cumbersome 50 page strategic report from PowerPoint to a fully integrated, online, automated strategy management process within 6 months. This transformation reduced their meeting time by 33% and their prep time for meetings by 75%.

In case that isn’t enough, we’ll walk through the day of the life of a ClearPoint monthly contributor to show how simple it is.

But first, some definitions.

Definitions

A ClearPoint monthly contributor refers to the person who makes updates to strategic elements (such as measures, initiatives, projects, or goals) each period.

A ClearPoint administrator is the person responsible for managing the Reporting Workflow, ensuring monthly contributors make their updates, and delivering reports to stakeholders.

With that, let’s dive in.

The Day in the Life of a ClearPoint Monthly Contributor

Coffee, anyone? (served with an email reminder)

At the beginning of the day, you power on your laptop and find an email reminding you that it’s time to kick off this month’s reporting. The email includes detailed instructions on how to complete your updates, when the updates are due, and links to each of the strategic elements you are responsible for. You log into ClearPoint to get started.

Clicking from the email takes you directly to the My Updates page, and there you can dive into updating your data. Don’t worry, there are instructions on the page as well as links to your full department scorecard and strategy map. This page is customized for you, with only the goals, measures and projects that you are responsible for.

Bagel time! (a bite for each task completed)

To make an update you simply have to choose which element you want to update first. Once you click into an element, you see that the data was uploaded thanks to the Data Loader. Pulling data automatically on a schedule, the Data Loader saved you half of the grunt work with your updates! Now, you can focus on filling in the analysis to provide context about what your data means.

Once you’re done filling in the analysis and any other fields, you mark the task as complete and click next. The update modal moves to the next element for you to update! No moving around trying to find your elements. You can click next to run through all elements you are responsible for.

Need additional information before you can make an update for 1-2 elements? No worries! You can skip any element for now. It will stay on your list of elements that need updates. If you forget to come back and update it, you’ll receive a reminder email before the updates are due so you don’t miss the deadline.

Empty Coffee

We know the transition from spreadsheets to software can illicit nostalgia and make you remember only the good of Excel Hell. If you’re comfortable with Excel because it’s what you’re used to, you can take advantage of grid reports to make Excel-style updates in ClearPoint.

The Monthly Update View lays out all elements you are responsible for in a table. It reminds you of your days in Excel and is super easy to update each element field from the page. An enhanced Excel-lookalike, this view also supplies notes from your administrator on how to update the fields.

You can make all your updates at once in this view and then save! No more worrying about formatting or version control.

Is it lunch time yet? (My updates are complete!)

That’s it, you’re done with your updates! You decide to use this extra time to view your organizational strategy and see how your company is performing. You can view your entire strategy from summary reports. It helps provide context for your updates and you’re left feeling inspired – you want to help your company meet these goals!

With your extra time, you view the ‘Red Alert’ report within ClearPoint to see which areas of the strategy need a boost. You reach out to your teammate to let them know you have extra bandwidth now to help support things that are falling behind!

You go back to the strategy view and find some elements you want to continue to monitor and receive notifications when they’re updated. You click into the element to mark it as a favorite. Within ClearPoint, you can mark any element or page as a favorite by clicking on the star button in the top right corner. Then, monthly you can view their progress from your ‘My Favorites’ view.

Behind the scenes: Life as An Administrator

For administrators, the process we just described is easy to set up and manage. With ClearPoint’s Reporting Workflows, administrators can automate and customize their monthly update process.

To create a Reporting Workflow, all the administrator needs to indicate is which reporting period updates are for, which elements need updated, and what the instructions and due date are. From there, the workflow will pull together the list of users to send updates to and will manage the process for you.

Once the Workflow is live, you can return to ClearPoint to get a summary of the update process. This view includes information on users who have:

1. Started, but not completed their updates. It will even let you know which elements they still need to complete!
2. Not started their updates.
3. Completed their updates.

From there, you can easily email individuals (from ClearPoint!) to remind them to complete their updates. No leaving the tool to track them down – you can do it all within ClearPoint!

On top of that, the Data Loader automatically uploads the data for you every month. You’re no longer worried about data accuracy due to spreadsheet errors. Since it’s automatically uploaded, you now find it amazing you ever spent so much time manually entering the data yourself.

All this time back has allowed you to focus on achieving the results you see in vision statements. With deeper conversations during board meetings, your team loves the new process.

What are you waiting for?

Does this sound too good to be true? At ClearPoint, we hear that a lot, but it is true, monthly reporting is easy in ClearPoint! ClearPoint’s easy update process improves communication with administrators and monthly contributors through our Reporting Workflows. Our process gives you 70% of your time back. With this time, you focus on discussing how to improve outcomes – as opposed to how to collect the data. Long are the days of getting lost in spreadsheets. Now, you’re deep in strategy conversations rather than lost in data. Making data-backed decisions has never been easier for your team.

[1] ClearPoint Survey, 2014.