The comment came at a time when I wasn't sure if what I had spent a few afternoons building would be useful or not. The COO of one of my enterprise clients had left it under the Trello reports I build him off his boards. I opened it expecting a thumbs-up. What I got was the single most useful sentence a client has written to me in a while, and it has quietly changed how I think about what a good report is even for.
He put a number to the report: it saved him two to three hours a quarter. Then, in the same line, he said the report was "much more valuable" to him than the time it saved, because he could now "provide MIS at will."
What MIS actually means
MIS is management information. Management information system, if you want the full term off the textbook, but no COO uses it that way. He uses it to mean the operational data leadership runs the business on: how much work is getting done, by whom, at what pace, against what target. It is the reporting he carries upstairs to the board and across to his peers to answer the only question those meetings ever really ask, which is "how are we actually doing." Not opinions. Numbers he can stand behind.
That is the job. A COO is the person in the building who is meant to always know the true state of the operation and be able to show it.
Hours saved is the small prize
I wrote earlier about how hours saved is the only KPI worth tracking for AI. The two to three hours is the number I would have led with in a case study. It is tangible but small, and it badly undersells the thing.
Because a few hours a quarter is not why he cares. Before, productivity reporting was something he did occasionally, because it cost him an afternoon of pulling numbers by hand and reconciling them against a Trello board that quietly lied about what was done. When a report costs you an afternoon, you ration it. You run it when you have to. Quarterly, for the board, grudgingly.
"At will" means the cost of producing it dropped to near nothing, so the frequency can go to whatever he wants. He can pull the same productivity picture on a Tuesday because a peer asked over coffee, or before a one to one, or the morning a board meeting gets brought forward a week. The task did not get faster. A thing he could not comfortably do on demand became a thing he can do on demand. That is a different category of win, and it is worth more than the hours.
Why "at will" is the whole job for a COO
Think about what reporting-on-demand does to how a COO operates.
Reporting that only exists when you have to run it for a board meeting, or a quarterly report is reactive. Someone asks how the team is tracking and the honest answer is "let me pull that together and get back to you." By the time you do, the moment has passed and you've spent hours doing it through an annoying interface which should be easy.
Reporting that can be run at will makes you the person who already has the answer before the question finishes. You can walk into any meeting able to say "here is exactly where we are," with the numbers open on the screen, and never have to promise to get back to them. For a COO that is not a convenience. It is the difference between being the operator everyone trusts to know, and being the one who always has to go and check.
This is about being able to answer for the operation, cold, any day of the week.
What I got wrong about my own report
The report itself is not clever. I wrote about the build a fortnight ago: I skipped the Trello reporting add-ons, connected straight to the board's API, and reconciled the list a card sits in against the label on the card, so a card sitting in Done with an In Progress label gets flagged instead of counted. About a hundred lines of code, and it sits securely inside Trello as a Power-Up, alongside a few other, apparently bad reporting plugins.
What I got wrong at first was how to measure it. I built this to save time using the by-hand checking. It works for this, but the by-hand checking was the small prize. The real one was making trustworthy productivity numbers cheap enough to produce that he stopped rationing them.
If you are building reporting, for yourself or for a client, that is the bar, and it is not hours saved. Ask what question the report lets someone answer that they could not comfortably answer before, and ask how often they will now answer it. A report that shaves two hours off a task you do four times a year is worth two hours. A report that turns "I can find that out if you give me a day" into "here, look" is worth something that does not fit on a timesheet. That is the real prize in any reporting you build for the people who run the business.
The tools aren't always easy things to measure, and saving someone time isn't the perfect KPI. Cheap, trustworthy answers are. Give an operator those and they will use them in ways you never built for. That is the compliment buried in "at will."
I do this kind of thing for clients most weeks: find the report someone does not trust, or does not have, and make it cheap and true enough that they reach for it without thinking. New here? The start of all this explains what I am building, in public, one day at a time, and the fund it exists to pay for explains why.
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Day 116 of 365.