Short version. A VP rebuilt the same report every month from eight teams' numbers, because nobody else was cleared to see them together. I didn't ask the teams to change how they work. I mapped what they already had into one table, checked it as it came in, and let scripts build the deck. It took a few weeks alongside my other work, and the VP's 10 to 12 hours a month are down to five or ten minutes.
01 · The problem
Someone has to make it all agree
Eight business lines report new business prospecting to leadership every month. Finance publishes the refreshed numbers. Business leaders add commentary and pipeline detail. Then someone makes all of it agree.
That someone was a VP. They resolved eight definitions, eight spreadsheet shapes and eight levels of completeness by hand, 10 to 12 hours a month. Bad months ran longer.
A month of reconciling, one minute at a time
Each square is a minute of the VP's month. Each row is an hour.
The confidentiality rule is what made the work so expensive.
Consolidated prospecting numbers stay inside a small leadership group, and the same reporting goes on to enterprise senior leadership. So the job stayed with the person whose hours were worth the most.
Why couldn't an analyst do it?Go deeper · 1 min
Seeing all eight lines side by side tells you more than any one line's numbers do. That combined view is the thing that's restricted. An analyst could clean up one team's sheet, but the reconciling happens across all eight, so it has to happen inside the group that's cleared to see them together.
That ruled out the usual fix of hiring help. The fix had to remove the reconciling, not hand it to someone cheaper.
The rest is password protected
The full study covers how eight report formats became one, the checks that catch problems at entry, and how the deck now assembles itself.
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