This is a guest entry from David van Heusden, the Product Manager for Performance Analytics. He has been covering the Performance Analytics pre-conference training and working with students on questions and issues. He related this story to me. David says:
An interesting question popped up during our Reporting & Performance Analytics training at Knowledge15. A customer wanted to know if you could exclude weekends from reports when you're reporting on 'dates'.
At first I thought, why would you want to do that? If you're not creating incidents during the weekend there is nothing special you need to do since the dates will be omitted from report because of a lack of data. Turns out that in the customer's use case there are incidents logged during the weekend but that these need to be ignored because although logged for and on the assignment groups they do not want to 'confuse' higher management with the weekend dips. This customer just wants to report the data from business days.
The solution is, as most often is the case, pretty simple and as most often starts with the data set and more specifically the filters that you will use for the report. We only want the data for the weekdays so lets make sure we add the proper filters for it. There is filter field option for date fields called 'trend' that we can use so lets add an OR filter for each weekday that we want to include in the data set. The filter and result is shown below:
After David showed me this approach, I thought it would be a good blog post to show the power and flexibility of the reporting engine. There are many ways for you to present data that you may have not thought possible. It's a good reason to take the Reporting and Performance Analytics training if you are not familiar with these options.
However, there is a word of warning. As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." People who look at this particular report may assume that all data from all days have been included. In this case, the report only shows data collected Monday through Friday. As you present data to people through reporting or Performance Analytics, there needs to be an element of trust. The consumers of the data need to be confident that what is being shown is accurate. If someone discovers the data represent something different from that person's understanding, you will have a hard time recovering that trust. And that will set you back significantly in your objective to provide visibility and get proactive.
