Playing as a Team
It’s been a fun winter for me as a sports fan so far. The Buffalo Bills have earned themselves a playoff berth, and the Dayton Flyers men’s basketball team is ranked 14th in the country, with a shot at going higher. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt this positively about both those teams. Hopefully it keeps going.
But they’re succeeding not because of any one individual on either of those teams (although there are talented players). They’re succeeding because they’re working together as a team to beat their competition. There have been moments in every game for both teams this season where they’ve had to have someone you wouldn’t expect “step up” for them in order to get the win. That’s the way it is with team sports; you’re not going to win on your own, you have to have your team with you.
The same is true about the workplace; every individual working at your company is there for a reason that presumably adds value to the bottom line. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be there, in a rationally run company at least. And it’s important that their contributions are valued and noted when undertaking any project.
Data projects are particularly important efforts on which to get the buy-in of the entire team. As we’ve mentioned before, every role in your company may be noticing trends or have questions about the way the business operates that could lead to new insights or at least new hypotheses.
With that in mind, here’s a list of 10 questions you can ask every member of your organization in order to collect a set of hypotheses that you can choose from to find analytic purpose for your data. If the overall goal is to increase your bottom line, you may find that some of the easiest ways to do this are already identified by your team - you “just” have to measure them and understand their causes..
What is the aspect of your job that varies most from day to day?
What aspect of your job is most challenging?
What aspect of your job consumes the greatest portion of your time on a typical day?
Are there things that happen outside the workplace that impact how challenging your job can be on any particular day?
Are there particular times of day when your job is most challenging?
What information do you find yourself most frequently lacking to do your job effectively?
Which tasks do you most frequently find you have to perform multiple times in order to be successful?
Is there a certain class of customer - internal or external - that is most difficult to satisfy?
What aspect of your job do you feel provides the least value, or is just “busywork”?
What would make you feel like you are being even more successful in your role than you already are?
Be prepared - the answers to these questions may not always be easy to hear. But you don’t necessarily need to solve each of them right away. What you can do is try to find trends, patterns and such in the responses, and dive deeper with those employees on those problems. Understand how they’re being restricted or constrained from adding maximum value, and figure out what factors might be impacting those situations. Then measure, analyze, adjust, and repeat. Incremental improvement is the name of this game. And you’re all one team.