Analytical Maturity Part 2: Moving stages
Using Richard Rumlet's framework to grow your organization use of data
Richard Rumlet in “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” wrote: “The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors”.
That’s also true for when you want to move your organization’s analytical maturity: you need to pinpoint the critical factors that will help you move to the next steps and design a plan to get there.
The framework we saw last week - the one that broke down analytical maturity into 4 components: the needs of an organization, its data resources, its processes & tools, and its data culture - can help you pinpoint the gaps in your organization - but pinpointing is only 20% of the job. Today we’ll discuss the remaining 80%!
This article is part 2 of a 3 series of articles on Analytical Maturity:
Part 1: Understanding Analytical Maturity
Part 2: Moving stages (this article!)
Part 3: What’s a “mature” organization
Let’s dive in.
Good strategy, bad strategy framework
I love Richard Rumlet’s book and I think it gives a superb framework to think about this. He explains that a good strategy has 3 elements:
A diagnostic: the most important part of the framework is the diagnostic - it is the base of your whole logical approach. Your diagnostic should allow you to understand the current situation, but also the cause and “why” the organization is there.
Some guiding principles: From this diagnostic, you can derive some guiding principles - that once you are on your journey to grow the analytical maturity will help you make your decision-making process easier and help you stay on track over time.
A coherent action plan following the above: Armed with your diagnostic and your guiding principles, your main task is to decide where you want to be under what timeline, and how you will get there.
Starting with a diagnostic
“A well-stated problem is half-solved” John Dewey
The idea is to understand the current situation and the true “why” behind it. You don’t want to tackle symptoms - your goal is to go all the way to the root cause and fix what needs to be fixed.
Here are a few tips on how to do a good diagnostic:
Start from the 4 dimensions we saw previously: needs / people / tools & processes / culture and assess your organization using this lens and get to the root cause in each of those areas.
Get data on current pain points and solutions:
Interview people: get to know people, their jobs, their decision-making process, and how they use the data in their day-to-day job
Shadow people: similarly, shadowing people can be a great way to get a deeper understanding of their day-to-day jobs, and can uncover insights that you wouldn’t have if you were to only interview them
Send a survey: depending on the size of your organization, sending a survey can be helpful for you to get more quantitative data. Bonus: it can also allow you to start tracking the feelings of your org toward “analytics”, and give you a benchmark you can report against later on.
Do a “literature review”:
Internally: review previous work and understand how people tried to solve the previous pain points if they were successful or not, and why
Externally: a lot of content is available for free on the web, and most likely the issues you are thinking about have been documented and discussed before (either in a nice article on HBR or on an obscure forum for analytics aficionados). It is always extremely helpful to get other people's perspectives on how to solve different problems.
Practice the 5 “whys”: ask yourself why every time you uncover a new insight. You want to take a bird's eye view of things and understand the key reasons for the situation the organization is in. Note that It is not necessarily an easy task, especially if you have been inside the company for a long time and you are used to things the way they are.
Deriving guiding policies
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” Mike Tyson
The diagnostic will uncover some patterns which should allow you to derive guiding principles. Those guiding principles will come in handy in a couple of different situations:
When defining your action plan: think of those as “guardrails” on the freeway: they will allow you to always stay on track and to make sure the issue you diagnosed will get solved
When faced with an situation that you were not expecting: you can use your different principles to facilitate and guide your decision making - that will give you an incredible peace of mind
When making trade-offs or saying no to stakeholders: saying no is always complicated - but this is essential for a good strategy. By making your principles clear and having your stakeholders agree to it, pushing back on their requests will be an easier pill for them to swallow.
The hardest part of the guiding principles is sticking to them – just like in life.
Setting up an Action Plan
This action plan needs to be coherent and cohesive and cover the different components of analytical maturity.
How to set up an action plan:
Find subject matter experts in the organization you are supporting, and work with them on the plan:
Walk them through your diagnosis and your guiding principles, and brainstorm with them on what should be the next steps and over which time frame.
If you are in a fast-paced organization, consider optimizing for optionality - giving you time to move the maturity of the organization but also to be able to answer “fire drills” or time-sensitive questions
Think outside of your organization: if you are supporting one part of a larger company, also think about how you will interact with the other analytical functions, and have that added to your plan
Set up success criteria: whenever there is qualitative work being done, don't forget about setting up success criteria. Like any other work, you should be able to say if this is a success once you’re done with it. So set a binary success criteria that will be able to tell you how you did. Put some thought into it - making sure the criteria will properly represent what you are trying to solve.
Set up reporting processes and timeline: doing the work is important, but if nobody knows about it or uses what you built, are you really creating value? Setting up a proper reporting process will allow you to achieve multiple goals at once:
Gives visibility to your work to a larger audience and facilitates collaboration opportunities
Facilitates a Go-To-Market strategy for your new analytical product (as you have a venue to advertise your new dashboards and reports)
Ensure Leadership buy-in: you can’t build a culture around data without the support of your leads. Present the plan to them and garner their support to ensure smooth sailing towards your goal
Closing thought: The formula for success
The FS newsletter shared this tiny thought the other day:
“The recipe for success:
The courage to start.
The discipline to focus.
The confidence to figure it out.
The patience to know progress is not always visible.
The persistence to keep going, even on the bad days.”
Ultimately - this is what it all boils down to. You need to have the courage to start the conversation around your organization's analytical maturity and where it should be, the discipline to develop your action plan (while addressing the immediate fire drills), the confidence to find the right solution despite potential naysayers, the patience and persistence of moving forward.