Understanding the Predictive Analytics Lifecycle

Appendix:Useful Questions

This appendix contains a very thorough list of useful questions. In my work as a SAS systems engineer manager, sales executives often requested questions to ask their customers to break the ice and qualify a given opportunity. I figured it would be good to have a list of questions available for readers of this book.

These questions will improve your meeting preparation. They will also help you clarify and test assumptions and inferences regarding the current or planned predictive analytics environment. Effective questions will initiate the sharing of information required for an effective implementation of a predictive analytics system. When asking these questions, ask for specific examples and agree on what important words mean.

To make the list easier to use, I have categorized the questions by chapter and by subcategories. I hope they are useful for sales staff as well as for those executive readers who will engage in conversations with technical staff in each of the predictive cycle areas we covered in this book.

Chapter 1: Identification Questions	Subcategory
How are analytic best practices shared?	Culture
Are cross-departmental projects encouraged?	Culture
Is data quality an issue?	Culture
How do different departments share information?	Culture
How important is intuition in your organization for decision making?	Culture
Do you feel your organization seems to be resistant to change?	Culture
Have you implemented a change management ...