I am a third year development analyst in London. I work for a large, privately owned developer, competing mostly in the megaproject space. Recently my company has implemented much more stringent reporting for our current projects - I really don't enjoy this aspect of the job and am thinking through whether to push back against this with my boss.
Previously reporting took 10 - 15% of my time. I would now put that figure closer to 30 - 40% depending on the month, spent producing monthly financial summaries as well as quarterly business plan updates. I understand that Development is ultimately an operational business but this seems excessive.
Is it normal to spend this much time reporting for development analysts / associates? In particular interested to hear how reporting is done at top developers in the States in anybody on here is coming from that background.
Bump
I'm not sure how London firms operate and if there's any difference between the UK and the US, but in general being an analyst sucks no matter where you live. If your company requires that much reporting, and you're the lowest guy on the proverbial totem pole, you're going to be the one doing the reporting.
Luckily for you, you're in your third year as an analyst. It's time to start thinking internal promotion or find a new job if that isn't an option.
Thanks CRE. Yes, we now have two intakes of analysts after me so hopefully some of this load will shift to them. Do you have a sense of normal reporting requirements for a large project?
In terms of internal promotion, next would likely be dev associate, which would be great but would likely no result in a reduction to the amount of time I spend reporting.
At analyst level I'd say 20-40% is pretty typical for a development analyst role. Development is a different game than acquisitions (which is what is mostly talked about here). It's a slower business, and as an analyst you don't have the expertise to be dealing with consultants and project management, so you fill your time with the tedious financial side, modeling, and market research.
You say associate wouldn't reduce the amount of reporting you do - that would be shocking to me, because as an associate typically you should be supervising the analysts who are dealing with that work, and reviewing their work. The firm would be trying to get you more involved with the bigger picture at the associate level at most places. If that's not the case at your firm and its more of a title bump without additional responsibility, well that's a good sign you should start looking for a promotion through a new job.
Analyst at a similar size developer in Europe and would say I also spend between 20-40% of time on reporting. Obviously varies week by week. I imagine that's the standard for any larger/institutional developer - even our associates spend a similar amount of time on reporting.
Okay, good to hear that this is relatively normal. Can you give any more details of what your reporting looks like?
At what level do you see this reducing at your company?
I probably spent a similar amount of time on reporting. It’s the boring grunt work nobody wants to do and it doesn’t require experienced input, hence why it falls to analysts. Key is to automate as many of the tasks as possible, I.e. make sure any outputs required are in your model so that you can easily just copy and paste into reports when needed. Amazed me how many people were going back to build outputs on a monthly or quarterly basis and wasting a few hours on this each time.
It reduces once you have someone to delegate this to. Presumably once you hit associate you’ll have an analyst to delegate this to. You’ll spend a lot less time on the grunt work part of it but you’ll be responsible for their output, i.e. checking the numbers and proof reading the reports to make sure they’re correct and mirror what what is being communicated internally / externally elsewhere. Analysts generally won’t have the same visibility of this as an associate would.
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