Automated Commission Review
Turning a disputed manual monthly process into a standardized workflow.
What was wrong
Every month, managers challenged the commission results. Our systems didn't reliably reflect who had actually hit quota, so the monthly review turned into an argument instead of a sign-off.
That's a bad problem to have. It's people's pay.
What I did
I didn't start by designing anything. I went and talked to the people on all three sides of the dispute:
- The managers challenging the numbers, to hear what they thought was wrong.
- Finance, to understand what they needed to be true before they could approve anything.
- The team producing the existing reports, to see how the numbers were actually being made.
That's where the discrepancies were coming from. Then I redesigned the workflow around a standard definition of attainment and worked with engineering on automating it.
Being rolled out now, so I'm not going to claim a result yet.
What I learned
When people dispute a number every single month, the problem is almost never the report. It's that nobody ever agreed on the rule the report is applying.