Analytics Assessment: how to analyze a project’s viability

Why should you do an Analytics Assessment?

Maximizing the potential of an analytics initiative is challenging, whether starting from scratch or migrating to a new architecture. It requires know-how across many areas of expertise to establish best practices and governance from the start. As data grows, managing it becomes increasingly difficult, often leading to inefficiencies such as data silos and governance issues. These challenges can limit insights and increase the complexity of ensuring compliance. Are you getting the most value out of your analytics solution, or are you facing these issues? 

An analytics assessment addresses these challenges, allowing to define a data strategy that will help you improve and ensure your data is fully optimized and effectively leveraged for better decision-making.  So, what are the main benefits of following this approach? 

Benefits of an Analytics Assessment

1. A tailored solution

The assessment phase is crucial for defining the architecture, approach, and procedures that will drive your initiative, whether you’re starting from scratch or enhancing an existing analytics solution. Every organization is unique, with its own specific goals and challenges, which is why a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. For instance, is the system for internal use, or does it also need to communicate information to external stakeholders? Do you have near real-time use cases, or are they batched? 

At this stage, decisions are made from a high-level perspective, allowing you to customize the solution to meet your organization’s unique needs. Rather than settling for a generic setup, decision-makers can tailor the approach, selecting the right approach that best solves their specific problems. This process also helps establish the necessary frameworks to accelerate the implementation and deployment, ensuring quality standards are met throughout the initiative. As data grows, the right controls will be in place, so you always know how the solution is evolving. 

2. Save time and money

The truth is, you’ll have to make crucial decisions during the initiative, but delaying them often leads to rushed choices and extra work later. When you start without a clear plan, you end up revisiting things you’ve already done, which increases the chance of mistakes and missed details. Your team can get stuck dealing with daily issues, feeling overworked, and losing focus on what really matters. 

That’s why it’s essential to prioritize tasks and anticipate key decisions from the start. A well-thought-out plan helps you focus on the things that will move the initiative forward and avoid wasting time and money fixing processes later. By doing a thorough assessment and setting a clear strategy upfront, you can avoid costly mistakes and ensure the solution you deliver truly meets your needs while keeping everything on track. 

3. Getting more value from data

Building an effective analytics solution means bringing together different stakeholders, often from various teams like IT, management, the various departments leveraging it, and analytics specialists. A solid assessment is a great way to connect everyone involved, making sure you understand their viewpoints and come up with a strategy that works for all. This helps define clear milestones and ensures a final solution that meets everyone’s expectations. 

To make this process even more effective, involving experts throughout the process brings significant benefits. Their unique insights can introduce new perspectives, helping to establish best practices and leverage valuable knowledge, such as industry standards and accelerators. By getting everyone aligned and working together from the start, you create a strong foundation of trust and collaboration, making it much easier to achieve your shared goals. 

Final thoughts

An analytics assessment isn’t just a questionnaire; it’s a dialogue that guides you towards the best approach for achieving your goals. This stage helps you avoid poor decisions and saves time by ensuring that strategies and processes are clearly defined before implementation or deployment begins, allowing you to establish a solid data foundation. Additionally, by taking a little extra time upfront, you will be able to start your initiative smoothly, with well-defined processes, identified risks, and solutions already prepared to mitigate potential issues. In the end, the whole process will be much more efficient, and most importantly, you will build a robust analytics solution to enable you to get more value from your data. 

José MirandaAnalytics Assessment: how to analyze a project’s viability

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