What a great week we just had in St. Pete Beach, Florida at our annual Perspective Users’ Conference!
This year’s conference was our first sell out since Perspective was released, there were many first time attendees (including one literally from the other side of the world—Australia) and it included one of the best sessions I’ve ever seen, as a presenter or attendee. The session I’m referring to is a client panel discussion where we had Delta Air Lines, Raytheon, Monash University and Progress Energy talk about how they use Perspective and the data they get from the program.
At the end of Day 2, as our team was winding down at supper, I happened to mention a statement made by two of the panelists from the earlier client session. One of them stated that during their implementation, they originally produced a classification list of approximately 1300 lines of classification choices. Then after further discussions, they realized how difficult it would be to get measurable metrics from that so they shortened the list to approximately 140 lines. The other panelist stated much the same as they had initially started with a “large list” but the first few months of reports offered metrics of ones and zeros. They quickly realized that this was not beneficial to them. Lenora Thomas, Director of Customer Service & Technical Support, then shared that she had the exact same conversation that day at lunch with four other attendees.
It was then that we realized just how important this topic really is… especially since I had just finished helping one company revamp their system, which they had been using for two years, from a class list of over 3400 choices to one of 250 choices. I guess my message in this case is, more is not always better. Just because you can track things down to a fairly detailed level in your class list does not mean you should, and often there is no need.
For example, another brief discussion with an attendee about this topic led them to realize that while they have ‘theft’ as a category, they have theft broken down over a dozen different ways between the subcategory and type list. They openly admitted that they have NEVER been asked for that breakdown, just for the total number and loss amounts of all thefts. Please know, I am not saying all of you reading this should stop tracking types of thefts. What I’m saying is that it may be a good exercise to honestly evaluate the need to track different types of thefts vs. just thefts as a whole. For example, do you need to track computer thefts in the class list, or in the involved items? Both have pros and cons and need to be evaluated to determine the best solution for you.
A descent measure of what you need to track and what you don’t could be to run some statistics for a 1 to 2 year span. Find all the values that don’t get used or only have ones or twos and take a good hard look at whether or not they need to be there.
Hope to see you at next year’s conference!
—Dale Yushchyshyn, CPP, Director, Implementation Services