Empowered by Data

Chapter NineHow to Set Up an Analytics Community

Having formulated your mission and goals as well as steps that support you in achieving them, the next step is to create a plan with milestones, targets, and dependencies.

Phase 1: Planning

With your mission and goals in place, it is time to make your community setup more tangible. Creating a plan, no matter how high level or detailed it might be, is a helpful approach to understand dependencies on processes, people, and systems and to see more clearly whether the structure, processes, and activities you have in mind can be achieved in the time frame you have given yourself. A plan also allows you to communicate with others more effectively on how community goals and activities relate to the larger organization.

As you build your plan, I recommend documenting the ideas you already are thinking about or have discussed with others. Here are a few steps you can go through to create your plan. Please note that the format depends entirely on what works best for you. Personally, I like creating these kinds of documents in PowerPoint so I have flexibility in the layout and design of the finished plan and can easily use corporate branding to give it a better visual appeal. You may prefer using a plan in Excel, perhaps even a project management tool, or you may write a document in Word.

To begin, create an outline with the different sections you want to cover. These include, for example:

• Introduction
  • State your community's purpose. ...