We’re not seeing the results we thought we would. What did I miss?

You hired great people and you had a good plan, yet you didn’t get the impactful results that you anticipated. As an IT leader, you know how valuable data analytics are. So why didn’t your initiative work as expected?

Here are some things to consider.

Team Makeup

Data science and analytics generally incorporates multiple people with skills falling into the general categories of:

• Data wrangling or engineering
• Database management and development
• Programming
• Statistics
• Data Visualization

On top of this, you need people who understand the business and can interpret the data to make business recommendations. Perhaps your team didn’t have the full range of expertise needed to achieve the desired results.

Technology and Tools

Few organizations get the full budget they request, so shortcuts are made to work within existing budgets. However, sometimes those shortcuts have a bigger impact than expected. Are there technical issues which have impacted the analysis, such as frequency of refreshing data? Number of API calls exceeded? Glitch with syncing fields?

Are your team members learning software they haven’t used before and maybe employed a shortcut used on a different solution that doesn’t work with what you’re using? Has an update changed functionality from a previous version?

Process

So much of what Data teams do is new, so there aren’t necessarily proven processes for a new initiative.

In addition, when parts of a project transition from one team member to another, whether inside or outside the IT or Data department, it’s easy for something to get dropped. Building frameworks for process or using tools designed specifically to manage data analytics projects can help, even if the specifics within a project change each time.

These folks may or may not be part of your official data team. All team members, though, needs to keep this group in mind. The data provided should help the analysts interpret and make business decisions, even if not data or IT professionals themselves.

How to change things quickly

Finding qualified analytic professionals is not easy. However, there is a new way to build a new team or integrate your existing team. This way, merges contract analysts with your full-time team. You can hire these professionals for one-off projects or as an adjunct team member. You could test new hires and see how they work with your existing team. If you need specialty skills, like data visualization, which maybe don’t justify permanent head count, this could help address a shortcoming while staying within budget.

You may want to consider working with a partner like Chisel Analytics. By leveraging our vetted talent pool, you can augment your team as needed. You will get talent with precisely the skills you need. Chisel can help you find the right talent for a single project, for an addition to your team or to help launch your data analytics organization. With the new talent on board, you’ll start seeing the results you were looking for from your data analytics projects.

Chisel also offers dedicated tools to manage data projects, including templates to help streamline efforts and introduce standardized processes. With templates for common efforts or the ability to save your own, this can accelerate efforts to change. As these were developed by a data analyst himself, you know that they will be well received by those on your team.