Where to start to choose the right D&A projects for your strategic goals?

There are tons of untapped data potential in a company, all with different complexities, challenges and expected benefits. The challenge, however, is that it can be overwhelming and it becomes difficult to know where to start.

This article from Bernard Marr describes an easy-to-apply process to identify and select the data projects that can lead to achieving your strategic goals:

⛰️ Provide a frame for ideation and strategic alignment

By connecting strategic goals to high-level use cases that can be used as a first guide to identify and triage ideas, but also further down the road will help with tracking expected and actual value.

💡 Conduct brainstorms relying on a canvas of business & technical questions

By having a consistent structure, it enabling teams to compare, merge and assess initiative ideas, you ensure having productive sessions and actionable outputs. Information gathered at this phase will serve as guidelines/reference during the delivery phase.

🔀  Prioritize and select use cases

By balancing risks/complexity vs expected benefits and selecting a few initiatives to focus on initially. Those first initiatives are usually on "quick wins" projects, that deliver value quickly and help build the foundations for scaling the efforts and the ambition, and pave the way to tackle more transformational initiatives.

This all really relates to our own approach to ideation and roadmap definition: everything starts with asking the right questions, having consistent frameworks is key to achieving visibility and alignment, and platforms like YOOI help accelerate and scale those process significantly.

This simple framework is a great start, and moving forward you might want to adopt more complex ones (like Gartner’s ROAR model, developing a comprehensive Infonomics / Data Monetization approach), in order to build, optimize and track the value of your Data & Analytics investments as an actual portfolio!

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Further reading: How To Identify The Data Opportunities For Every Business? -by Bernard Marr - LinkedIn