I have been struggling to write articles that create value for my sustainability benchmarking and assessment community. We as software developers write code. It isn’t similar to writing an article or a post. However, the core idea is to communicate. I personally have 15 years of experience writing software systems, I have helped many teams automate their benchmarking process in past 4 years.

One is my core skill is developing web applications. Recently when I and my business partner Gautam Shah were demonstrating our web platform “Probench”, a question was asked after the call.

Are ranking digital rights using XML to display graphs on their web page?

I did some digging and found that they are not using XML, instead, they are using JSON. It didn’t take much time to find that answer that was my “Aha!” moment, I thought teams publishing benchmarks and indexes would love to know what their peers are doing. I was confident about it because most of our clients and prospective clients have asked for peer benchmarking feature. So ideally they should also learn about the technology stack of their peers.

Page Breakdown

World Map: The first thing that you will notice as soon as you are on the page is the Map. It is created using d3js and the map is done using datamaps. It also has few stats and the Industry is highlighted using Font Awesome.

Key Findings: As the subtitle suggests it mentions a few key findings and links to the summary, recommendation and full report.

2018 Company ranking: It displays the score table of companies for both the Industry. Each row in a table has displayed a single row bar chart for each cell. They have used CSS to display Horizontal chart, click here to see the CSS code.

Year-on-year comparison: Improvement of companies from last year is displayed using SVG + CSS, click here to see the code.

Report Highlights: This section has 5 links that address Inadequate disclosure, Security uncertainty, Privacy failures, Policing speech and Telecommunications disconnect.

Data Source

One of the data source mentioned on the page was in JSON format. There are 4 assets available as listed below:

1. https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2018/assets/static/overview.json
2. https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2018/assets/static/companies.json
3. https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2018/assets/static/difference.json
4. https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2018/assets/static/index-service.json

Other Technologies

jQuery: jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License. Web analysis indicates that it is the most widely deployed JavaScript library by a large margin. ~ Wiki

https://jquery.com/

Nginx: Nginx is a web server which can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and first publicly released in 2004. A company of the same name was founded in 2011 to provide support and Nginx plus paid software. ~ Wiki

https://www.nginx.com/

HTML 5: HTML 5 is a software solution stack that defines the properties and behaviors of web page content by implementing a markup based pattern to it. HTML 5 is the fifth and current major version of the HTML standard, and subsumes XHTML ~ Wiki

https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

Matomo: Matomo, formerly Piwik, is a free and open source web analytics application developed by a team of international developers, that runs on a PHP/MySQL webserver. It tracks online visits to one or more websites and displays reports on these visits for analysis. Wiki

https://matomo.org/

Mobile

The page is shown correctly on the mobile phone. The speed score on page speed insights by Google is 28 out of 100. All of this website appears to be optimised for viewing on a mobile phone or a tablet.

Ranking Digital Rights is 959,231 Most popular website in the world. Over the past 3 months, this website has experienced a moderate increase in popularity. Source: http://www.alexa.com/

I would love to know in the comments below if this post is useful to you. If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

Decoding — Ranking Digital Rights 2018 was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Disclaimer: The story you are about to read is the work of the author’s imagination

It is a story of a Benchmarking Manager, named Mrs Bunny and her team member Data Analyst. Her name is Dash. The project that Mrs Bunny and Dash took was to benchmark 50 companies using the spreadsheet. They pick this tool because of the following reasons teams have chosen it for many years.

1. It is available on your machine
2. It is easy to format for data collection
3. You can add custom formulas and macros (Dash will write code and script)
4. You can share it with companies using emails.
5. You can create graphs and charts on benchmarks.

The Start

The team got all excited and started planning for the benchmarks. They choose the tools of spreadsheet and email with all the right knowledge and intentions. Dash was confident about her skills and all set to work for this cycle.

The key takeaway from the kick-off meetings

1. Make it easy for companies to respond.
2. Make the scoring generic for all companies.
3. Create a sophisticated automated scoring system using macros.
4. Once the formula is put, the analysis should be done automatically.
5. The score should be converted to different bands (Gold/Silver/Bronze)

Dash’s estimation of creating the scoring system took longer than initial time. Mrs Bunny was not particularly happy about it.

The crack started showing up when they realised there was a critical error in the calculation and to fix it has to be done across and a simple change took hours of work.

The Middle

After Dash working hard and creating the template in spreadsheet solving all the problems till day. The team got a grip in the benchmarking process. Everyone was happy, and like any human, once we reach a milestone, we aim higher. They focus on the scoring strategy and thought about how to improve it in terms of outcome for companies.

Mrs Bunny came up with the idea that it would be great if she could edit the scoring method to try a few things. Since her skills were not adequate to make those changes. Dash was also busy with her backlog. (If you also could relate to Mrs Bunny type “Yes” in the comments below)

Mrs Bunny had the following wishlist for the scoring system:

1. I wish I could make the change to the score at each indicator.
2. I wish I could add weightage for each indicator.
3. I wish I could make a change after the data collection is complete.
4. I wish I could recalculate the complete score on click of a button.
5. I wish I could add more sophistication on top of the calculated score.

The End

The team continued with the current assets and kept working on the project. One day they heard about a Purple squad, they have solved similar problems for others. They took a decision to ask for help from the Purple team.

The benefit Mrs Bunny and Dash got from the purple team:

1. The opportunity cost of scoring was high. (the cost of rework and discussion will pay off the product of purple team)
2. They picked a focus group who needed in-depth analysis, and that added more revenue
3. The purple team supports them when they need them.
4. Instead of thinking in terms of cost they started thinking in terms of value.
5. Mrs Bunny and Dash focus on benchmarking rather than operations and communication.

The team never went back to the dark side of calculating scores using spreadsheet macros.

A dark story about inflexible scoring in benchmarks was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If some one asks me about what I do or what our product do, I have find it difficult to explain in few sentences.

What do we do?

We provide a web platform which helps the team to publish sustainability benchmarking/Indexes reports. We do that by animating complete benchmarking process starting from (a) collecting data, (b) analysing them (calculating the score for ranks) and © generation bespoke benchmarks for each participant (primarily companies).

Once the data is collected from an online survey tool it is analysed and transformed into Scorecards which has averages, benchmarks, ranks etc. It is followed by the last step to publish individual feedback report to each participant with ratings/bands/scores on where they stand and suggest best practices from the leaders. There can be any bespoke stats, info graphs, charts and images in them.

Using our software they collect data for their members/participant, analysis them and generate bespoke benchmarks. We are like a technology partner for the Sustainability researchers/team

Our clients include responsible investment (UN PRI), responsible banking (UNEP FI), nutrition (Acces to nutrition index), corporate responsibility index by (BITC), animal welfare (business benchmarks for farm animals welfare), Diversity index by (LGBT Great) and 8 others. Thus we are domain and industry independent making our platform more flexible and robust to handle data point from a few hundred to 9 thousand.

Participants can be companies, countries or individuals who need to be benchmarked using the same sets of indicators. Since the analysts can also fill in the indicators via publically available data on the web. The platform works beautifully within the team.

My Perspective

At my core I am a software developer, I love solving problems by developing better software. When we got this business we had to do multiple roles, I picked sales to be one of them. I knew it would be difficult and with no track record of selling previously. It is a challenging role to perform, to find the teams who could benefit the product and learn more about their current challenge. Pitching the product in a niche market is a different ball game.

Now that you have a little back story, I find it more comfortable to understand the current problem that the user may have. Thus making the presentation more conversational and trying to help with the solution.

However, as the saying goes

Think from a customer’s point of view

They may not have time for the sales presentation call. They would rather read your pitch in say a few minutes to make the decision. I agree with them. If the product solved the problem so effectively the story has to be told well.

After attending many sales videos and reading to a number of articles and constantly explain the product on chats and email. I came up with the 5 paragraphs mentioned above.

If you ask me “Am I happy with it”, My short answer would be NO. However, one thing I have realised I didn’t become a good software developer in my first year but it took me more time. I am a journey and with coming months I will only get better.

We could have hired an external agency, but one of my core belief is if the owner of the company can’t sell its product its kinda shame on me. Plus it is very expensive for outsourcing sales.

Conclusion

I am learning each day many things about our customers, our product, the messaging. Overall the sales numbers are not where I would want them to be. However, the number of demonstration of our platform “Probench” is very good. We are collaborating with many of you to make sure this technology is used well.

We should be able to talk about our product in 5 sentence, 5 paragraph, 5 minute video or 50 minutes demo.

There is no excuse for anyone with or without prior knowledge of sales. What are your thoughts? Are you facing similar challenges? Do comment below.

Why do I find explaining my product difficult on email? was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The act of bringing two of our colleagues or friends into personal acquaintance with each other.

While chatting, answering and sharing the post of all the #Sustainability #Expert here in the community, I find a few of my colleagues/friends/peers here need to talk to each other if they are not already talking.

It started when in one week I did four introductions using email. I step back and thought how can I proactively expand this to a great opportunity to help the community.

The idea that spark is was to share my thinking with the community in LinkedIn and post an example given below.

I think Jessica García Lama could talk to Marije Boomsma on moving to Asia from Europe for working on the sustainability field.

#Daily #Introduction #0029

I will introduce two of you each day and mention the topic that you both could discuss. It would be my #tiny nudging to the community working towards the #Sustainable world.

PS: If you like this initiative put a hashtag of your interest/work in the comments below. I will take it as guidance & advice for future introductions.

If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

Daily Introductions was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We launched a service start of this year, Scorecard as a service

This article is behind the scene on the sales pitch of Scorecard as a service. We have seen a gap in the Sustainability Benchmarking and we believe this will help to fix it. We had this idea going since a year now and we had to package it to make sure it is communicated well.

In order to make sure the idea is sold and the story is told nicely. We searched on the internet for the best sales deck and we easily found this article. We had some selling principles and this deck matched it completely.

We believe that giving value to the clients and thinking about how we can help them grow is always good for the business. It also gives you ideas to come up with products and features that are more valuable to clients.

Everyone is talking about Bigdata, I will tell you about SmallData

I started looking for the core theme around this sales pitch and “personalization” was the key that I found. I accidentally stumble upon it in a Salesforce article which had some interesting data. I picked one out of it.

Now that I had the template of the presentation and the theme that I was going for, it became easy for me to build on it. I completely stole the idea and repackaged it with our story and value that we will bring to our clients.

I hope you too take some inspiration to create your presentation.

The two key slides were the “Participants Expectation” and “Scorecard Identity”

This slide was where we have to think about our client’s client. Thus making sure our client will become successful and efficient in delivering value. Since the core shift is happing the same for all of us and since I had the opportunity of meeting a few of my client’s client in London.

We could connect the dot in the end. Gautam and I went back and forth before thinking through all the outcomes the participant expects. We went through a few of the incidents that our clients have mentioned in the past.

This was like the core, Gautam coined this word scorecard identity.

We still were focused more on values and outcomes rather than features of the service we would provide. Then we ended having the final slide explaining the core features of the service.

We will transform your raw data collected into a well designed bespoke scorecard for each of your participants.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Feedback from your existing clients is very important

After it was done, We shared it with our close associate and received 2 major change.

• To whom this service be useful

• An example of a scorecard as an outcome

You can watch the full final presentation here

Let me know what did you thought about this presentation in the comments below.

Making of our Sales Deck, Scorecard as a service was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Solution

1) Calculating the scores manually using a spreadsheet and copying the response/score. This is very time consuming and error prone process. Imagine reconciling scores for more than 1000 data points, and you may be forced to do this more than once depending on the submissions by the participants.

2) Your scores should be calculated automatically at the end of each response. There can also be a Recalculation done by a button click right away. Thus, allowing you to take last minute entries.

This makes it easy for the analyst to even make any scoring method correction after the data is collected. Thus, it gives them the leverage for continuous improvement based on the current data available. It can be more powerful to allow them run the same scoring method over past year’s surveys, too.

Thus, calculating scores of around 2000 participants can be done in minutes. This gives an opportunity to draw the year on year progress made. Automating the scoring process will make it error-free and a quick feedback cycle which will bring greater accuracy in the results.

You can download the ebook from here to read the rest of the chapters.

If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

Automating scoring with only one click was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You will have some data in online csv format or google sheets, and you quickly want to see how it will look in a bar and line graph. See this in one click.

Tool: Charted (http://www.charted.co/)

1. How it works?

2. Try an example

3. You can share the link to others once the chart is created.

4. You can take a screen capture and use it as an image on social media.

5. If you update the spreadsheet, the chart will be automatically updated.

You can download the ebook from here to read the rest of the chapters.

If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

This is called a beautiful automatic chart was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evidence becomes the backbone of your benchmarks and assessments. To manage the documents, public web link and other artifacts are vital. Your time is spent on organising them and linking them to specific responses. This can be cumbersome to both participants and analyst.

One of the solutions is to have evidence library utility to store all evidence in one place.

Evidence Library is an online repository to collect documents. It could be added to each of the indicators/questions to map them appropriately and also remove the document. When participants or analysts need to visit the document, it should be easily searchable. It is good to have ways to add and edit remarks for mentioning specifics to look into the documents uploaded.

Our Evidence Library has many tiny features which our clients love:

1. You can provide a link and take real time to screen capture and convert it into a pdf file and uploaded it to the platform. Three activities in one click.

2. You can search all the evidence which are in the pool of the current survey of the particular participant.

3. You can search and attach the same evidence file to multiple questions. You can modify the description for that instance if needed.

4. You can edit the reference of the evidence at any given point in time.

5. You can browse all the evidence if you don’t know or remember the name of the evidence.

6. Add additional tit bit information, which can, later on, come in handy.

You can download the ebook from here to read the rest of the chapters.

If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

Do you know about Evidence Library for your Sustainability Research? was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a very common question that comes to any professional especially sustainability analyst or manager performing sustainability benchmarking and assessments. I will first explain 3 ways you can have software at your office for work.

Building a software

Building a software system in today’s world is not far-fetched. It will cost anywhere from 50 thousand to 300 thousand and will cost you an extra year of time.

There are few common reasons why, in computer history, teams have built software.

1. Create custom process for the team and save more time and money.
2. Giving teams a market advantage with new ways of doing things.
3. Providing the participants with their special requests.

Buying a software

Buying is another alternative, but it is more expensive. However, you can start using it once it is installed and configured at your premises or your data center (Server space). You will be stuck with the product if it doesn’t work according to the plan. A full time IT person will be needed to maintain it.

Renting a software

Renting is fabulous in the era of Uber, AirBnB, and Amazon web services. Few advantages of renting the software known as Software as a Service

1. Start using instantly or in a few days.

2. Stop using it any month; stop paying for it.

3. Use it over a web browser; no installation and maintenance services are needed.

4. Best for teams with no IT team to help.

How about building your special request on top of the rented software you have purchased? Wouldn’t that be better? In most of the scenarios we have experienced over the past many years, the standard process of doing benchmarking remains the same. It will have half a dozen variation on different steps which seem like a completely new benchmarking cycle.

Hybrid Solution

80% of the software should work from the rented service that is provided. Above all, it should be able to plug in the bespoke (custom) request. Some of the suggestions we can share from our experiences are

1. Dynamic Surveys ( See Chapter 18 )

2. Instant Feedback ( See Chapter 13 )

3. Custom Question Types ( See Chapter 19 )

4. Automate Notifications ( See Chapter 66 )

5. Stage Your Process ( See Chapter 03 )

*The chapters are given in details in our eBook Benchmarking Innovation, you can download your free copy here.

Think about a platform where making custom changes to your software is a onetime process. The upgrade will be built in a few weeks’ time, also making the others upgrade from the teams using the software available for all. You make the best of both world and keep your cost affordable.

Our software, Probench will cost you less than 3 Starbuck coffee a day.

You can download the ebook from here to read the rest of the chapters.

If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

Do you rent or build software for sustainability? was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of our clients said

“I think working with this type of complex methodology with so much data cannot work in spreadsheet. That increases the risks of error”

We have seen this with every team we have onboard to Probench who used to calculate the score using spreadsheets. See if you feel the same pain while using the following steps:

1. You pick one researcher who has worked little in excel or spreadsheet. You ask her or him to create the scorecard and create the complex formula and statistical formula.
2. The person sometimes out of no choice or inclination to help the team takes the job. They often don’t like it and find it too much of work.
3. She/he creates a Big Sheet which contains all the required calculation and formula to formulate the score card.
4. Someone from the team copies all the data from the spreadsheet to the big sheet or calculation sheet. Each row or column at a time and makes sure the data is not offset by one (1) to the label against which it is to be mapped.
5. The formula that was created in step 3 will execute and bring the result sets.
6. Then it will be manually copied to another spreadsheet to create the scorecard or manually copied to a word document to format a scorecard.
7. When you discover there is a score mistake in methodology, or you have learned something new which changes the weightage. You have to recalculate the entire calculation for all participants.

Few of the steps above would have been automated using macros in a few instances. However, overall this will be a painstaking task.

Solution

Software which automates the scoring algorithm. Once configured correctly, it should work for all. We at 73bit handle this task at 2 levels.

Default Scoring

Surveys can be structured in the form of tree with nodes in it. Each “node” in this survey can be assigned a score. By varying these values, questions can be weighted in relation to each other. Based on the score value of each node and the responses of the users the score is calculated each time a user saves the responses. Due to the tree structure, the scores of the child nodes are rolled up to the parent. So we suppose that based on the user’s response, if a child node scores 50%, then the score of the parent will automatically reduce by 50% depending on the weightage of the child question.

The scores can also be updated long after the surveys are complete. This is often useful, as new interpretations may arise during the auditing process. When the scores are updated after the submission of the survey, then we have a way where we can recalculate scores for each of the participants on just one button click.

This saves the manager from a lot of rework and makes the process error-free saving a lot of time providing confidence on the outcome.

Custom Scoring

Sometimes due to the complex methodology, the scoring is not as straightforward as mentioned above. There may be many complex calculations involved like in the case Access to Nutrition Foundation where their methodology involved something called Healthy Multiplier and Global Multipliers. These multipliers are basically there to incentivise the companies based on their policies and add these multipliers to their scores.

So to handle this type of complex scoring, we have datasets where we use the default scores generated by Probench and apply various mathematical formulas to get the desired output. This only has to set once, and scores can be calculated for all the rest of the participants again on just a click of a button.

This way, the complex requirement of scoring gets resolved the way you may have resolved it using Excel sheet but here it only has to be done once, and the rest will be automatically taken care of by the system.

You can download the ebook from here to read the rest of the chapters.

If you decide to share only one post this week, consider this article next time.

Complex Scoring was originally published in 73bit Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.