Your data and analytics team serves stakeholders from various departments. How do you choose which projects to work on?
First off, I do believe you and your team should own the prioritization process and decisions. Of course, you’ll want to seek guidelines from executives and heavy input from stakeholders, however it’s your job to make a proposal, gather feedback, course correct, get buy in and communicate the final decision.
I’ll be talking about the first step: making a proposal of what projects your team will work on next. Here are three questions to ask.
How can you align with company strategy?
Not all departments are strategically important at all times.
Perhaps your company is ramping up sales hiring. Pay more attention to the sales department. Perhaps you’re getting ready for fundraising. Pay more attention to finance. Or maybe survival depends on certain product features getting released. Pay more attention to product and engineering.
Give whatever projects they ask for high priority. The more trust you’ve already built with the stakeholders in that department, the more likely they’ll come to with these high impact projects. But if they aren’t asking for much, be proactive and investigate how you can help them.
Aligning with company strategy means the work you do will be high visibility and high impact. If your team executes well, it can translate to a higher degree of trust going forward, leading to more high impact projects.
Are there specific, strategic decisions where data will make a difference?
Look for stakeholders who look to data to inform not rationalize their decisions. And look for specific decisions they are considering that are high impact and irreversible. You can help brainstorm which data sources and analyses will be helpful.
An example might be in marketing – how to allocate marketing budget across a variety of channels and demographics. It might be in product – what kinds of features to build next.
You should give less weight to decisions where data is being used to rationalize rather than inform. You might need to work on it anyway, but you shouldn’t spend much time on it because the work won’t likely make a difference.
Which departments have an operational bottleneck where you can help?
See which stakeholders have an operational bottleneck that you can help with that will affect their KPI. This requires getting to understand their KPIs and workflows. (Books like The Phoenix Project and The Goal have been tremendously valuable in helping me understand bottlenecks and the Theory of Constraints.)
For example, suppose time to contract close is a KPI. If operations has to run a long-running report before any new contract is finalized, perhaps making that report run much faster will decrease time to close a contract by 1 day.
Or, suppose lead conversion rate is a KPI. If you can change a lead scoring job to run in real-time rather than periodically, maybe you can reduce the response time to a new lead from 15 minutes to 2 minutes and thereby increasing the conversion rate by 10%.
You should pay less attention to efficiency improvements that do not boost a KPI, though that work can help you build better relations with stakeholders.
Next steps
These questions should be a good starting point to figure out how to balance competing priorities from diverse stakeholders and for writing up a case to work on certain projects over others. But it’s just a starting point.
Once you have a proposal, you’ll want to get feedback from stakeholders, make adjustments, and get buy-in on the final plan. And you’ll want to drive that process in a way that is transparent and fair to your stakeholders and your team. (More to be written about all that later!)
You’ll have a much better time at this if you’ve already built up trust with your stakeholders. Check out 5 ways to build trust with stakeholders.
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