Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection

My job responsibilities include monitoring the reporting of data from external companies to my  organization. Often companies will lose track of their reports or simply stop reporting and our response  rate will suffer. I used mind mapping to try and brainstorm and implement some solutions to this issue,  and get the companies back to reporting. Our records for these companies have a large amount of extra  information that goes beyond the actual quantitative reported data. Our normal collection of data and  the administrative date we are able to collect along with reported numbers allow us better organize our  thinking and problem solving. Our ultimate goal is to figure out ways to best get back into contact with  non-reporting companies.

Application

The first step in this process with my team was for each of us to look into the administrative data of  comparable companies that are reporting, to see if any patterns stick out. Helpful information could be  the method companies send us data, physical mail, faxed, our online reporting system. Once we have  each looked over our data and identified ideas we meet up to compare ideas and discuss what we think  would be most effective to solve our issue.

Beyond that initial step the next phase for us would be to being applying these examples to the  companies that do not report, if we see a lot of companies that report are receiving their mail from us at  a P.O. box and those who do not report are being mailed to their physical location we may look into  those addresses to see if a P.O. box is available for them. We would also look over any feedback we  receive from phone conversations and try to relieve those actual verbally presented issues.

Insight

From our internal use of mind mapping we were able to identify that companies who have a leader in  their accounting or finance department on the mailed attention line report at a higher rate than  companies who have no attention line or who have a non-finance person on that line. We also found  that companies in certain industries were more susceptible to going out of business so those industries  needed to be monitored more closely to ensure we did not continue to expect reports from defunct  businesses. With those ideas in mind we began to review the companies we felt would benefit the most  from a more in depth look and changes to how we pursued them for their reporting duties.

From our external use where we got actual verbal feedback from companies who were not reporting,  we were able to identify that the biggest issue was the difficulty of completing out report. With this in  mind, we planned to more aggressively offer to do the reports for companies if they send us their higher  level raw data.  We also found that many companies simply did not want to do the report and we were  able to identify those as lost causes and no longer focused attention on to trying to get them to report

and were able to utilize our time on pursuing companies that may possibly be willing to report if we can  get into contact with them or help them out more.

Approach

For our purposes, considering we have a vast array of administrative data and a large population to  analyze against, mind mapping was the most effective tool. We also have the ability to attempt new  ideas and analyze its effectiveness over time to see its effectiveness, so are not required to go all in on  an idea and run with it immediately. This tool was the most effective because we had a very broad  group of ideas but needed to best put them onto paper and share them between our team so we could  eventually all apply the best of best ideas and not keep those findings in a personal solo. Next time I  think we can largely follow the same plan but may look at external feedback and issues before we look  into our administrative and internal data.

