Email report
The Email Report is an automated digest of some insights around what happened in your company. Emails display capabilities are limited so we had to make a number of tough choices to balance readability and usefulness of insights in the reports. All the information you get in Email Report is also available on the main Application. This document explains you everything about the Email Report.
Outcomes section
The Outcome section displays how the effort allocated to each outcome this week compare to previous week.
We display the allocation of efforts across intended outcomes. This table lets you see at a glance whether an outcome occupies a disproportionate amount of the companies or if the allocation is calibrated as your expectations.
This image is a screenshot of the Activity Digest of the Outcomes section in the Report for an example organization. The information displayed is condensed to be able to compare the allocation of effort across outcomes and the changes with previous week, so let's pick it apart.
In this picture we see that Customer-Value, Throughput, and Risk-Mitigation have the three longest Activity bar. The length of the bar represents the proportion of the company's active contributors tagging their work. In this example Customer-Value is the longest bar, indicating the most-contributed-to Outcome. Note that the longest bar always takes the whole width for readability reasons (see notes section).
We report the activity of the current week compared to the previous week for each outcome. We have three possible cases: (i) an outcome got more focus than previous week, (ii) an outcome got less focus, or (iii) the same amount of focus. When an outcome's focus grew or reduced between the weeks, the amount of increase (resp. decrease) is highlighted in green (resp. striped red) and the stable amount is in blue. In short, to read "this week" you visually sum "green+blue", to read "previous week" you visually sum "redstripes+blue". You never get green and red on the same line. For instance "Phoenix", "Replatforming", "Customer value" all got a significant increase over previous week, Risk Mitigation and Throughput got an equivalent decrease of focus over previous week. Be careful to avoid drawing conclusions from the Report when comparing weeks if the total amount of contributors seen by Echoes changed significantly between the two weeks because the "normalization" would be different (i.e., you could falsely believe that an Initiative was de-prioritized when the real event is that a whole new team has been onboarded in Echoes, to work on an other outcome).
In the ordinary case where the headcount does not change significantly between the weeks, the activity report let's you glance how the increase of focus on one outcome is compensated by loss of focus another outcome. In previous example we can see that Throughput project was a major focus of previous week but this week this effort was re-dispatched to the Phoenix, Replatforming, and Customer-Value outcomes.
Notes:
- activity is not aggregated upwards the outcome tree
- display bars are normalized to take all the visual space, this is handy on cramped devices like mobiles, however you cannot directly read what fraction of the effort a given length represents (if you are on a computer you can overlay your mouse to get some tooltip info)
Teams Activity section
The Activity section displays the break-down of effort of across each Team. You can read whether a Team is spread across outcomes of focused on a single outcome (to decide whether such an allocation is desireable is up to you).
We display a granular matrix showing how each Team's effort is spread across company's Outcomes. The main representation of this dataset is a heatmap as follows.
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For each Team and each Outcome, we show a pair of tiles. The density of the color represents the activity. The left tile is previous week and the right tile is current week.
For instance, reading "rows" in the above picture: "Team F" seem to be the most spread-out team, whereas "Team H" is more focused (albeit changing focus from "Risk mitigation" to "Customer Value".
Also, reading "columns" in the above picture: we can say that "Replatforming" and "Phoenix" are only supported by "Team F" in this organization.
Note that each row shows one Team and teams may have varying amount of contributors. Thus, you cannot directly compare two rows and deduce which team spent the most engineer time on a given Outcome, you can only tell which team was the most focused in proportion to their headcount.