Field Note: an observed pattern, not a claimed engagement outcome.
Symptom
Before every board meeting, a scramble. Exports from several tools, manual reconciliation, a CSV nobody else can reproduce, a handful of undocumented judgment calls, the two corrections everyone knows to make, and a copy-paste into a polished deck.
What I Notice
The deck looks like output from reporting infrastructure. It isn't. The reporting infrastructure produced inputs; a person produced the number. And that person's judgment calls — which are often good judgment calls — exist nowhere in writing.
What Is Usually Actually Happening
The official and shadow systems have traded places. The dashboard is ceremonial; the spreadsheet is authoritative. Leadership believes it is looking at instrumentation when it is looking at a monthly act of skilled manual labor.
Worth saying plainly: the person doing the pulling isn't the problem. They're compensating for infrastructure that can't answer the question, and doing it well enough that nobody has ever had to fund the fix.
Why It Matters
Numbers that require a heroic monthly reconstruction can't be trusted between reconstructions, which means the company effectively sees itself once a quarter, in retrospect. The reconciliation logic is also a single point of failure with a home address — when that person leaves, the board reporting leaves with them.
What I Would Investigate
What exactly happens in those 48 hours, step by step, including the corrections people make from memory? Which of those steps encode business logic that should live in a system? And how far is the gap between what the dashboard can produce unaided and what leadership actually needs to see?