Getting Your Data in Time for Reporting

Introduction

For most of our clients, collecting reasonably complete datasets in time for reporting is an ordeal. With this in mind, Scope 5 was designed to make it easy to distribute the burden of data collection among peers. Specifically, Scope 5 makes it easy to manage admins that have varying degrees of visibility and control over subsets of the organization's data hierarchy. 

A special type of admin known as a Data Provider can be made responsible for a specific set of trackers, regardless of where in the hierarchy they reside. The Data Provider admin type has been traditionally reserved for users (often outside the organization) who's sole job in an organization's Scope 5 account has been to provide data. By comparison, other admin types are able to (and encouraged to) generate charts and reports and to explore their peer's data. 

Many of our users have taken advantage of this structure to delegate the job of data collection to a set of admins. Some accounts rely on hundreds of facility managers, distributed across the globe, to provide data on a regular basis to be submitted in CDP reports or other types of reports. While this functionality has certainly eased the burden of data collection, we've come to realize that it could be significantly enhanced. With this in mind, and based on specific user feedback, we recently deployed functionality designed to make data accountability pervasive in the Scope 5 application.

Data Accountability

The new functionality is built on two sub-features:

1. The ability to assign data responsibility for each tracker to a responsible admin.
2. The ability to schedule prompts to be sent to admins to remind them to provide data necessary to bring their trackers current.

In the remainder of this article, we'll touch briefly on these two data accountability features. For a detailed explanation of each, see this article on Tracker Responsibilities and this article on Scheduling Admin Prompts.

Tracker Responsibilities

In early versions of the Scope 5 application, tracker responsibilities were used to assign specific Data Provider admins responsibility for maintaining data on specific trackers in a many-to-many fashion; each Data Provider admin could be made responsible for many trackers and each tracker could be assigned to multiple Data Provider admins responsible for maintaining their data.

Newer functionality implements two enhancements to this structure. The first is that it is possible to explicitly assign responsibility for any tracker to any admin type (other than Supervisor admins).

The second enhancement is that only one admin can be responsible for any given tracker. While this may seem like a step backward from the many-to-many relationship that had been supported, experience shows that limiting responsibility for any tracker to a single admin actually increases accountability and data integrity.

Scheduling Prompts

Once admins have been assigned responsibilities for maintaining trackers, it's possible to schedule admin prompts to be sent to these admins. In doing so, account managers configure the application to automatically, periodically send emails to responsible admins, reminding them of the trackers that they are responsible for that are in need of maintenance. 

Admin prompts are designed to help produce a complete dataset in time for some regularly recurring due date. This may be a monthly due date (such as for some internal report that's due each month) or an annual date (such as for a CDP report) or different intervals in between. Think of recurring admin prompt cycles, each culminating in a corresponding due date. (Note that there is also a one-time option in which prompts are scheduled to be sent just once on a certain date).