A finance director I worked with once printed every report his team had produced that month and rang round asking one question. What did you do because of this? For two thirds of the list, the honest answer was nothing. Read, nodded at, filed.
The Issue
The economics of reporting have inverted and most businesses haven't clocked it. Ten years ago a report was expensive to build, so the ones that existed tended to matter. Now everyone has Power BI and a warehouse full of dashboards, and a new chart costs minutes. Reading it costs what it always did. The constraint has moved from production to attention.
So reports breed. Someone senior asks a question once, an analyst automates the answer, and the pack keeps landing every Monday long after the question died. Nobody kills it because killing it takes a decision and letting it run takes none. The result is a business that feels well informed and acts on almost none of it.
How to avoid it
One test. If this number moves, who does what differently? A name and an action. No name, no action, no report.
A hotel group I know tracks pickup, the bookings taken this week for future dates, against the same week last year. If a month falls behind, the revenue manager moves rates that day. Number, name, action. The same group's old 40-page monthly pack was accurate, nicely formatted and changed nothing.
A logistics firm cut its weekly ops pack from 30 measures to 6. One survivor was first-attempt delivery rate by depot. Dip below threshold and the regional manager rings that depot the same day. Failed deliveries fell within a quarter. The data wasn't new. The named person on the hook was.
The mechanics are unglamorous. List everything you circulate. Write the owner and the action next to each. Delete the blanks. You'll get one or two complaints, usually from whoever built the thing rather than anyone who used it. Then spend the recovered hours making the surviving handful of numbers reliable enough that people act without double checking, because a short list only works on trust.
The Outpost approach
Every engagement starts by cutting before it builds, because a dashboard bolted onto a bloated pack is just faster furniture. What survives is a short list of measures, each with an owner, an action and a threshold that triggers it. Then we make those numbers bulletproof, right first time, every time, from source systems the team already runs.
Good reporting is an editing job, not a volume one. The businesses that do it well don't have more dashboards than their competitors. They have fewer, and they can tell you why each one exists.
If your Monday pack has grown faster than your revenue, we should talk.