Building a Data-Driven Enterprise: The Playbook
It’s not often you get the opportunity to implement an award-winning and market-changing solution. It takes a lot of collaboration, teamwork, and a little blind faith to get something like that off the ground. But like any good endeavor, the payoff for both the client and the team working through it can be huge.
Most enterprises are not invested in a single IT platform. As I tell C-suite and IT leaders all the time, the organization needs to use the right tool for the right job. When I coach leaders, however, I coach to rationalization over chaos. And when we see reports of the average large organization using 367 Apps to complete work, it can get a lot overwhelming for organizations to understand not only their overall technology footprint, but the cost of work.
Understand the Intake - Creating the Data Container
How does the organization create, vet, and plan large projects? There is generally a process by which an enterprise plans for the year. It can take the form of the EPMO, an Epic Troika, Strategic Operations, or any other enterprise planning group. Platforms like Asana, Monday, Jira Align, Planview, or Apptio can help create the overall data container of these efforts before being broken into execution.
Determine the Planning Process - Governing the Key
Once the project is accepted, how do teams break down and prioritize the work? Whether we use a quarterly or PI planning process, more of a sprint-based planning process, or milestone-to-critical-path process, keeping the connection to the original data container is critical. Without this key, it becomes a significant amount of work to infer conclusions instead of being able to effectively trace them. Even all the way down to the smallest work item.
Using the same work execution tool across teams like Jira may not be possible, but we can at least govern the key across platforms.
Execution Management - Balancing User Burden with Costs
No one likes a time sheet, but we’re still operating with them in many circumstances. Until we can find better solutions, time sheets provide us a way to understand the level of effort it takes to execute on our projects. Using things like Netsuite, Clarity, or Atlassian Marketplace Apps like Tempo can provide you the automatic aggregation of time and work data tied back to the governed key.
Personnel Data - Roles and Rates
Whether we’re looking at FTEs or Contractors, Developers or Portfolio Managers, there’s a significant amount of data we can unlock in our HRIS systems. Workday, Hibob, and others help us understand who our people are. They provide us role titles and general labor rates so that when we’re planning for projects, we can provide an equivalent dollar amount to understand what it costs to deliver a project.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get this data in real time or near-real-time? The most difficult connection is tying people, their role, their rate, and their time to the work.
Integrating Financials - Determining CapEx and OpEx
The financial planning and health of the organization is critical to understand the success or failure of your projects. After all, if you’re not tracking your spend, how do you know when to pivot or persevere? My clients have used Oracle Financials or SAP as their financial systems of record when it comes to their Project Accounting and General Ledgers.
The rate, role, and status of the top-level data container and all of the subsequent data containers down to the individual work task need to be tied together. However, each state of the overall data container will then determine whether or not the effort is capitalizable or operational. Based on specific local and regional differences, there are usually substantial tax implications when reporting on both.
Aggregate the Data - Bringing it Together
Platforms like Tableau, Power BI, Looker Studio, Snowflake, Databricks and others can help your organization visualize the data to make it make sense. The key thing to remember, however, is what is the data meant to tell you?
In one case, we brought Objectives, Key Results, work progress, time sheet, and financial data into a single-pane-of-glass dashboard that also answered the question of, “What’s left?”
Building a data-driven enterprise is not as complicated as it may seem. However, when working with an extensive technology footprint, you will need to understand the organizational silos that need to be crossed to bring the data together. Each system may be owned by a different part of the organization and it takes a strong leader with a powerful vision to bring it all together. I’d love to chat more about how I created an enterprise solution that did just that.