Data you can trust
Your projects generate data constantly. As a PM, your job is to turn that data into a clear picture of where the project stands, so stakeholders can make decisions and act on them. This data can take various forms: a milestone due date, the status of an open risk, finance statistics, completion rates, and a whole assortment more! But this data is worthless if you don’t trust it.
Why data trust matters:
Data is of high quality if you can trust it, i.e. if you know that it is telling you the truth. For example, just because a workstream’s status slide reports green, doesn’t mean it is actually green. A data point is only useful if there is a legitimate and trustworthy process sitting behind it. Most of the time you have no easy way to know how fresh that data is, who updated it, or where it came from.
This is the real risk in reporting. A project going red can be managed, that's what PMs are there for. Presenting data you can't stand behind, to your own team and to the executives making decisions on it, is a different problem entirely. Reporting confidently on stale numbers means the entire leadership chain is steering on information that simply isn't true.
Of course, diligent PMO teams will be chasing their PMs for updates, but this takes a lot of time and requires meetings that our calendars don’t always have time for: reaching out to the PM to ask for an update, waiting for their reply, updating your logs, etc. It’s a long process for a few data points, let alone the hundreds that make up your reports.
Let’s make your life easier:
Handles gives every data point a freshness state. Your data syncs live, so your reports always show the latest numbers your teams have entered. For each data point or table, you set the cadence you've agreed with your workstream leads, for example, aging after three days, stale after a week. One view then shows you what's fresh, what's aging, and what's gone stale across the whole portfolio, so trust in your data is something you can see rather than something you assume. Where something's gone stale, one click sends the owner a chaser to update it.
Handles shows you exactly how data flows across your files and workstreams; and keeps a full record of how every figure has changed over time. Trust stops being a leap of faith. Now, it's evidenced.
No more chasing however many workstream leads you have. No more debating whether the data's current before you go and bother a PM. Handles already knows what's stale and who needs to fix it. So you can stop manually auditing trust into every report, and start proving, at a glance, that green means green.