The Reality of Sustainable Agile Analytics Transformation: Key Aspects

In today’s ever-changing environment, fast - and accurate - decision-making is a game-changer.

Seeing Gartner’s Top D&A Trends for 2022 reiterates and confirms the huge need for developing sustainable agile analytics capabilities within our teams; capabilities that will ultimately act as a business enabler, ensuring our organization delivers state-of-the-art decision-making capabilities. 

Rita Sallam, Gartner’s VP Analyst, stated,

“Now is the time to anticipate, adapt and scale the value of your D&A strategy by monitoring, experimenting with or aggressively investing in key D&A technology trends based on their urgency and alignment to business priorities.’’

Now… how can we reach a sustainable development and delivery pace if our organization doesn’t have the ability to be adaptable, fast and responsive in the first place?

The main prerequisite for achieving such status – embedding an Agility mindset, frameworks and culture among teams – has proven to be harder than just some workshops, a brand new task management tool, and some ceremonies here and there.

Wondering what sustainable agile analytics transformations looks like?

Depending on the context, sustainability can mean different things. But in general, it’s once the organization reaches that sweet spot, where data & analytics architecture, technology, processes and team’s skillset are properly orchestrated to deliver the right solutions  at the right time – mostly. Remember, we’re still humans at the end of the day 😉.

 

What are the key takeaways from achieving a sustainable agile analytics transformation?

Leadership commitment and attitude – Let’s be honest. There’s no way an initiative will fly if leadership is not onboard. Creating a self-organizing and accountable environment where all team members can share their insights, seek and provide information, feel engaged and supported as well as empowered, will play a big role in the transformation as it will facilitate the proper atmosphere for new ideas and innovation.

 

Team setup and layouts – We all understand that sometimes segregation of duties is needed. Organizations are so big that sometimes it’s just materially impossible to own end-to-end initiatives. But, whenever possible, it’s key to design teams in such a way that they will be able to deliver without many external constraints or blockers, and design smart and lean processes to ensure the work is properly orchestrated.

 

Objective setting and monitoring – The way we set and frame objectives, will inform people about the WHY we are doing what we are doing and what we reward as an organization. Establishing clear and transparent ways of measuring it, will provide insights at various levels, ensure that we can adjust when needed. It’s okay if things don’t go as expected. But in that case, let’s make sure we do something about it, and that it’s reflected in the way we set and track our objectives.

 

Technical enablement – Most people misinterpret Agile Frameworks as a process-driven change only. But the truth is, if you’re just implementing the ceremonies and artifacts without having the proper technical enablement that allows you to deliver value to your customers when needed, then you’re not really transforming your organization beyond a small change in the workflow.

 

Agile budgeting – Let’s make sure we allocate our money to initiatives that bring the most value and demonstrable progress. The whole nature of agility is small batches for faster feedback, better insights and more accurate business value delivery. This should also be reflected in financials; when we optimize money, we spend on developing the right set of features.

Always keep in mind that Data is one of the most important assets that the organization can have. But like everything in life, the ”how” we manage it plays an even more crucial role.

We need to ensure we build a proper innovation and development ecosystem that facilitates insight generation and decision making. This will only be possible if the organization successfully orchestrates strategy, processes, technology, and human capital to deliver solutions that delight its customers. 

 

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