Agile by Design

Chapter 20Analytic Ever After

Still need a starting place? Feeling a little overwhelmed? If you know that your organizational engagement model and analytic delivery processes need to improve, but you don't know where to start, begin with an assessment of your current state capabilities across the analytic lifecycle. It can be helpful to validate the work you're currently doing today against the capabilities we've outlined in this book, but we recommend using it as a guideline. You'll want to add in other aspects that are unique to your analytic team and organization. A pilot project provides a good starting place for proving out your new deliver capabilities. Once you gain confidence and momentum, then you're ready to start scaling up.

Beginning Your Journey

The first phase of your analytic process improvement initiative is to determine what needs to change within the process, who will be affected, who will be involved, how changes will impact the organization or your customers, and what techniques you can use to address different opportunities. Certainly, you can use agile methods to address problems across the ecosystem, but they might not always be appropriate. Before you go agile, determine how agile you really need to be. Also, keep in mind that the organizations that are most successful with agile are the ones that prepare for it. Consider Table 20.1.

Table 20.1 Questions to Ask When Deciding Whether to Be Analytically Agile

Capability	Questions to Ask
Strategic ...