Roadmap for Keeping Your Analytics Project on Track

1. Define the goal you want to reach

First, you have a rough idea of what you would like to accomplish. We will meet with you to help you identify the primary goal that makes sense for your business, for example, increased campaign efficiency, higher customer retention, or a recommendation engine for your e-shop.

It’s vital for a data project to show immediate benefits so it is important to utilize our expertise and experience during each of the steps to help you deliver cost benefits and the return on investment (ROI) that stakeholders can easily understand, along with identifying the correct reports that will be needed.

We will define proof of concept (POC) with improvement opportunities for the data solution, and you will start to get an overall picture of a target data landscape, including a roadmap describing the journey to reach the target. We will tailor the solution to your needs.

2. Compare as-is to your target picture

Often it makes sense to conduct a Customer Data Maturity Assessment to map the current situation and identify the gaps in business-coverage, improvements in architecture, and any data quality issues.

We make sure to stick to an iterative cycle during the analytics project where our expert team presents initial results to you to make sure we are on the right track, get immediate feedback for any tweaks needed, and keep you involved. Such an approach enables us to deliver value to you early in the process but in this phase, we also shape the final model. Continuous data curation and integration along with assessing data stewardship requirements, teams, roles, and their responsibilities in line with any gaps that are found between the current status and the primary goal leads to good data governance. Data analysis at this point allows for refinements and clearer management of the objectives

3. Set possible shortcuts and achieve quick wins

Third, in line with the roadmap’s final destination, we will establish potential shortcuts that could achieve quick wins for you – building these as limited-budget individual projects with their own targets, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and deadlines. It is vital to understand that shortcuts may not achieve premium results, but they can still play a crucial role in improving targets and increasing your revenue – they are quick, jump-starting the delivery of goals, and generally are cheaper.

At this stage, we discuss goals, budget, timelines, and at least the first stage goal is determined. The final goal is split into doable stages to address the project incrementally, delivering value to the business with every stage.

We will identify the right building blocks for your project. Starting with more foundational services might be needed such as data quality improvements, data integration, or standardization. And then setting up Master Data Management and diagnostic or descriptive analytics for discovery and insights. Using advanced analytics (prescriptive or predictive), we can help you tackle strategic challenges. Initial analytics and data science at this stage may provide additional objectives to help you achieve the primary goal. Furthermore, at this step, aspirations such as data stewardship, recommendation systems, look-alike modelling, market basket analysis, customer lifetime value (CLTV)/ retention/churn, plus customer social media behavior, life events, segmentation, and their journey with you, can be prioritized as short-term or long-term goals.

4. Derive individual milestones with business value

At this step, we prioritize specific, individual projects to improve business value. Each project or milestone will have a defined KPI as a goal and such KPI is derived from the main goal that our client wants to achieve.

We base these decisions on the analysis of quality data to generate projects with specific benefits to your business. These objectives will save you time, and money, and help you utilize resources more effectively, or achieve all three benefits.

Opportunities exist for increasing efficiency, improving conversion rates, personalizing the customer’s experience, revenue prediction (MRR/ARR), and improving customer loyalty to prevent churn.

5. Reach your final goal step by step in manageable iterations

The final phase is to work step-by-step towards the primary goal always identifying gaps and improving. Each stage of the project can either build upon a previous stage using a different analytics service or could also focus on a different KPI and add new services into the mix. Each stage moves you closer to the final goal.

An example of such a project that increased campaign efficiency was an analytics project for a bike retailer. Simplity conducted customer segmentation that resulted in a set of recommendations for campaign targeting as a first step. In the next stage, we also conducted a market basket analysis to identify what products are purchased together for higher cross-sells. Read more about the project with Mojekolo.cz here.

There are many ways to define the analytics roadmap towards your goal, depending on the timeline, budget, and what you want to achieve – these potential paths will help us identify the solution that we propose so that we can create value for you quickly.

Summary

Overall, this type of roadmap is a robust solution. It is not always bad to take shortcuts and sometimes they can make more sense. Although the shortcuts are faster, they may not lead to the best quality results compared to the "main road", where more time, money, and effort are invested into proper data governance and data quality.

We offer specialist cooperation that assists you in identifying and working towards your primary goal and helps you discover quick wins. All backed up by our extensive knowledge, experience, and data analysis skills, all of which can deliver business value to you fast.

A consultation with us will make your particular mountain easier and quicker to climb just like with a mountain guide. Our services will help you define that primary goal and assist you in mapping out the shortcuts and quick wins on the road to the top. Get in touch with us to start your ascent now.