Book Image

Building Analytics Teams

By : John K. Thompson
5 (1)
Book Image

Building Analytics Teams

5 (1)
By: John K. Thompson

Overview of this book

In Building Analytics Teams, John K. Thompson, with his 30+ years of experience and expertise, illustrates the fundamental concepts of building and managing a high-performance analytics team, including what to do, who to hire, projects to undertake, and what to avoid in the journey of building an analytically sound team. The core processes in creating an effective analytics team and the importance of the business decision-making life cycle are explored to help achieve initial and sustainable success. The book demonstrates the various traits of a successful and high-performing analytics team and then delineates the path to achieve this with insights on the mindset, advanced analytics models, and predictions based on data analytics. It also emphasizes the significance of the macro and micro processes required to evolve in response to rapidly changing business needs. The book dives into the methods and practices of managing, developing, and leading an analytics team. Once you've brought the team up to speed, the book explains how to govern executive expectations and select winning projects. By the end of this book, you will have acquired the knowledge to create an effective business analytics team and develop a production environment that delivers ongoing operational improvements for your organization.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
12
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13
Index

Stakeholder engagement – your primary purpose

Your primary role and that of your analytics team is to engage with stakeholders, including executives, sponsors, and subject matter experts, to understand their challenges and problems; translate those challenges into analytical applications and models; build those applications and models; prove that the new data-driven approach delivers superior operational results on a reliable and repeatable basis when compared to the previous approach; convince the executives, sponsors, and subject matter experts to adopt the innovations and changes; document and communicate success to sponsors and executives; and then to do it again and again, on repeat. This is the stakeholder engagement process. The stakeholder engagement process is illustrated below in Figure 9.1.

The stakeholder engagement cycle/process is at the core of why the executives gave the approval to fund you and your team. You need to know and understand that the execution...