- Tags:: 🗞️Articles, Data Team Vision And Mission, Measuring A Data Team Impact, Data Analysis
- Author:: Benn Stancil
- Link:: A method for measuring analytical work - by Benn Stancil (substack.com)
- Source date:: 2021-11-05
- Finished date:: 2021-11-17
About how the work of a data team (regarding analytics) is to help make fast decisions.
Analysts should judge their work by how quickly people make decisions with it. (Time To Reliable Insight)
One of the great ironies of the analytics industry is its utter inability to measure itself. Despite “defining key metrics” for ambiguous business processes being a key responsibility in nearly every analytics role, we enthusiastically reject doing it for ourselves. Our work has been, and frustratingly remains, unmeasurable.
Beyond measuring the right goal, focusing on the time it takes to make a decision has several other benefits, both in how it measures our work and in the incentives it creates for us as analysts. First, it forces us to understand the problem we’ve been asked to solve. By tying ourselves to a decision, this measure discounts dashboards searching for a problem, or undirected exploratory analysis prompted by people who are “just wondering” something. We can’t minimize the time it takes to make decisions without knowing which decisions are being made. (…) You take the time that’s necessary to give someone the confidence to make a decision, and no more.