People Analytics sneaky frustration: How to count people over time?

Analytics is a funny discipline. On one hand, we deal with idealized models of how the world works. On the other hand, we are constantly tripped up by pesky things like the real world. One of these sneaky hard things is how best to count up people at various points in time, particularly when they are liable to move around.

In other words, how do you keep track of people at a given point in time, especially when you have to derive that information from a date range?

Within people analytics, you run into this problem all the time. In other areas, it isn’t as big of a deal. Outside of working hours (sometimes maybe during working hours), I run into this when I’m in the middle of a spreadsheet full of NBA players. Let's explore by looking at an easy-to-reference story from 2018. Close your eyes and imagine I’m about to create an amazing calculation when I realize that I haven’t taken player trades into consideration. George Hill, for example, starts the season in Sacramento but ends it in Cleveland.

How do you handle that? Extra column? Extra row? What if he had gotten traded again? Two extra columns? Ugh! My spreadsheet is ruined!

Fortunately, One Model is set up for this sort of point-in-time metric. Just tell us George Hill’s effective and end dates and the corresponding metrics will be handled automatically. Given the data below, One Model would place him in the Start of Period (SOP) Headcount for Sacramento and End of Period (EOP) Headcount for Cleveland.

Along the way, we could tally up the trade events. In this scenario, Sacramento records an outbound trade of Hill and Cleveland tallies an inbound trade. The trade itself would be a cumulative metric. You could ask, “How many inbound trades did Cleveland make in February?” and add them all up. Answer-- they made about a billion of them.

Putting it all together, we can say that Hill counts in Cleveland’s headcount at any point in time after Feb 7. (Over that period Cleveland accumulated 4 new players through trades.)

So the good news is that this is easy to manage in One Model.

The bad news is that you might not be used to looking at data this way. Generally speaking, people are pretty comfortable with cumulative metrics (How many hires did we make in January?). They may even explore how to calculate monthly headcount and are pretty comfortable with the current point in time (How many people are in my organization).

However, being able to dip into any particular point in time is new. You might not have run into many point-in-time scenarios before-- or you might have run into versions that you could work around. But, there is no hiding from them in people analytics. Your ability to count employees over time is essential.

Unsure how to count people over time? Never fear.
We’ve got a video below walking you through some examples.