Karl outlines several key steps to maximizing your success in an analytics deployment. He shares practical steps toward analytics adoption throughout your organization, as well as some personal illustrations from his family's own adoption journey.

Welcome back for part 3 in our blog series on maximizing success from your analytics deployment. This series is comparing the family adoption process we went through to an analytics (or any technology really) deployment. User and corporate adoption are critical for success. As a reminder, here are the five steps essential to success:

• Build excitement
• Follow a thorough vetting process
• Commit to your decision
• Get help!
• Replace the old with the new

In the first post, I introduced you to my adopted daughter, Tori, and this adoption concept. Next, we discussed the importance of following a thorough vetting process. Today, we’re talking about committing to the decision.

Above: My wife with Tori on the day we brought her home.

Commit to Your Decision

August 4 was just a few short days before Tori’s first birthday, and that was the day the powers that be let us take her home permanently. Adoptive families call this day “Gotcha Day,” and it is celebrated commonly like a birthday, especially with international adoptions that can be very complicated. But this was the day we were all in.  In our minds and hearts, there was no plan B after this (even though legally we hadn’t finalized). We were in this for better or for worse. It was an exciting, scary and emotional day for all.

In the world of analytics, making the phone call or sending the e-mail saying, “I’m in” or “Let’s go” or “Purchase approved” can be quite scary. You’re in now. There’s no immediate turning back. As a leader, it’s important to now stay committed. I’ve heard it said that the journey from here to there (see part 1) is easy at the beginning of the process because there’s excitement, easy at the end with the light at the end of the tunnel, but it gets hard in the middle.

Staying committed is critical for leaders, but know that you don’t have to do it alone. We and others are here to help. Here’s what it looks like in practice for InterWorks to support your analytics:

Our blueprint for success (to be talked about more in the fifth part) walks through what to do after you commit to your decision. There are so many things to consider, tasks to complete, projects to work on, people to engage, data to wrangle, systems to integrate, blogs to write, analytics to perform and lots of data to see and understand in order to make better decisions. This can feel very overwhelming.

Maybe you’ve already passed this point in your journey. You’ve already made your “all-in” decision, but things aren’t going the way you want. You may feel … overwhelmed. You know you’ve made the right decision: Tableau, visual analytics, Snowflake, etc. Maybe your team isn’t as all in as you are. This is where grit and our next step come in.

Push Through the Difficulty

We always knew Tori was a special needs child, even before we brought her home. When we brought Tori home, we thought her special needs were mainly visual, but we were quickly overwhelmed when we realized it was much bigger than that. My wife runs a non-profit rescue group for dogs and cats. We have always had many dogs running around our house. The first day Tori came home permanently, she was TERRIFIED of those dogs and screamed as if being attacked, even though the dogs were as sweet as they could possibly be with her. Over time, Tori adjusted, and you may remember from day one, she even has a dog of her very own.

Above: It wasn’t always perfect. Halloween, two months after Tori came home with us.

However, there were things about Tori we couldn’t solve by ourselves:

• Her slow physical development in her fine motor skills, speaking, walking, etc.
• Her educational development
• Her mental and emotional challenges that would develop a bit later in childhood

Maybe you’re overwhelmed because:

• Your POC was so successful that the CEO wants his answers now.
• Your data isn’t quite as neat and clean as you thought it was, and your team spends hours per week wrangling, cleaning and exporting data from one system and to another for Tableau.
• You are being pulled in a million directions as a leader.
• The content being developed isn’t up to the company standard.
• The content is great but usage is low.

Know When It’s Time to Get Help

As our time with Tori progressed, we needed, and we sought out, help. If you’re feeling in over your head with your adoption strategy, get help. What does that look like? Practically, it could be something simple like reaching out to an industry expert for outside support. Our Assist practice is tailormade to directly answer your questions and offer you real support from a variety of experts with an even broader range of experience and skills. If you need some more heavy lifting, our next post will more clearly detail what getting help looks like.

Need help now? Reach out to us, and let’s begin mapping out a strategy to solve your challenge. Want to learn more? Check out the next post in this series for more advice on getting the help you need.