Yes, it is that time of year again, March Madness!  To most people in the U.S., this means they are frantically poring over data and statistics to put together what they hope will be the winning bracket in their office’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament challenge. 

To individuals’ whose companies do their management reporting on a quarterly basis, it means they too will soon be poring over data, but not to obtain basketball glory and the accompanying office immortality.  Instead, they are furiously pulling together data from all areas of their business to create the reports they need to hold effective management reporting meetings.

Over the years, the likes of CBS Sports, ESPN, and Yahoo have enhanced the NCAA tournament office pool experience with websites and apps that have made managing and keeping up with the tournament bracket of everyone in the office simple.  All employees can now easily see who their officemates have picked, how many points they have so far, and even what their best possible score is. 

What about the pool managers?  Well, they have been relieved of the duty of managing scores of sheets of paper by hand – or even entering information into spreadsheets – to figure out each individual’s score and sending the daily (or, at least once per round) score update.

If you have ever managed the office pool, then you know what I’m talking about.  And, if you have ever managed your company’s management reporting process, you can relate as well.

So, if technology can make NCAA Tournament office pool reporting so easy, why can’t it do the same for management reporting?  Well, it can.  Enter ClearPoint Strategy (www.clearpointstrategy.com), the easy-to-use, web-based management reporting tool from Ascendant.

With ClearPoint, Joe the analyst who handles your company’s management reports (meet Joe here) is officially a badass.  He no longer has to pester everyone to collect paper reports from all of the objective, measure, and initiative owners and hand key them into a spreadsheet with all of the blood, sweat, and tears that requires.  Rather, Joe provides those individuals with a login and they update the data in the system themselves.

OK, so it is easier to get the data in one place, but what about those crazy reports everyone needs to see at (preferably, before) the management review meeting?  No more hours spent manipulating Excel and PowerPoint to get those reports to look just right.

ClearPoint’s flexibility gives Joe the power to create custom views of management information, including automatically generating charts and graphs from a slew of templates, linking information across the organization to illustrate alignment, and easily tracking initiatives and milestones with powerful project management tools.  He can also easily publish this information to the web and export PDF briefing books to email to managers days before the meeting.

With all of the extra time badass Joe will now have, you may want to ask him to manage the office March Madness challenge.