Agile by Design

Chapter 3Getting Your Analytic Project off the Ground

Regardless of whether your organization is analytically nascent or mature, engaging with your business stakeholders is the best place to start. Even in analytically mature companies, different functional areas within the business may need assistance in defining and prioritizing their analytic projects. To help illustrate our point, we'll follow a hypothetical company with very common challenges through an analytic project. In our narrative, Isabel, our lead data scientist at ADP, is having a conversation with Sherry, the vice president of the call center. Sherry's group has noted a significant decline in customer retention and believes that analytics can help them solve the problem. Isabel engages with Sherry's team to better understand the business problem they're trying to solve, and helps them craft a vision for solving it.

Figure 3.1 illustrates the process that the team goes through in the visioning process.

Figure 3.1 The Customer-Centric Analytic Hub Visioning Considerations

A Day in the Life

Our lead data scientist, Isabel, comes into the office, and before going to her desk she takes a look at the team's task board to get an up-to-date status on their work in progress. Her team is working on several strategic projects at the moment, and the board gives her a current view of what work's been accomplished and what's ...