Difficulty validating your data
Validating data means assessing their accuracy and reliability. Some data—such as revenues or expenses—are easily validated because they're objective and regularly audited.
For example, you can tabulate invoices generated by your group to determine whether the revenue figures for your group are correct. Or you can review accounts payable figures to judge the accuracy of expense information.
Data provided by outside sources—such as organizations that track companies' market share—can also be considered valid.
Other data are more difficult to validate. Consider employee morale, a new product's innovativeness, and customer satisfaction. Such things may be important indicators of your group's performance. But how reliable are the data you gather on these metrics? Because such data are subjective, they can be easily manipulated by individuals seeking to make their performance look better than it really is. Still, subjective data are important. In fact, leading indicators are often predominantly subjective (customer surveys and employee morale, for example), and are valuable because they can help your organization proactively manage performance. However, avoid relying on just one subjective metric as the indicator for a critical success factor. A single subjective metric won't give you a comprehensive enough picture of what's going on.