When you engage an outside firm on any company initiative, it’s important to understand their practices, how they do things, and their principles. This increases the likelihood of finding the right fit and achieving a great outcome for your analytics initiatives.
This series will provide an overview of how FirstLight works with our clients to achieve impactful business outcomes. This series is written for all new, existing, and prospective clients to help you get to know us and know what to expect as we work together. This first post focuses on the principles, and subsequent posts will dive into practices.
Over 7 years of serving clients, dozens of engagements, and hundreds of years of combined professional experience, we have distilled the best practices for delivering analytics solutions for our clients. Some of these practices are borrowed from proven frameworks like Agile and Scrum, while others are simply what we have determine works. Collectively, we call these ideas and practices the FirstLight Analytics Service Delivery framework, or “FASD” (pronounced “fast”) for short.
This post will focus on the key ideas and philosophies underlying that framework, and serves as a good starting point for learning about the whole framework. Future posts in this series will provide an overview of FASD and dive into specific phases of our engagement.
Our Service Delivery Framework is built on our values and identity.
What we value: We value relationships, health, and time, both our clients and our own.
Who we are: We are a team of experts in data & analytics.
Why we exist: We give our clients better ways to see and use information, so they can focus on what matters most.
How we do it: Our 5 qualities we strive to always show are
What do these high-minded words have to do with data? To us, it means at least these three things:
Here’s how behave and implement these imperatives as we work with our clients.
While all 5 of our qualities play an important role in how we serve our clients, compassion, respect, and service have a prerequisite: we must know, intimately, the company we seek to serve. Only people can define value. Therefore, value can only be created by people, for people. Creating value from data requires this vital context. Without it data is just ones and zeroes.
Behaviorally, this first takes the form of listening, an expression of both compassion and respect. On all of our job interviews, this is listed as the #1 key activity for all of our Service Delivery team members. Listening means asking good questions, then being quiet to hear the answer, then asking the next intelligent question. It also means capturing and remembering the answer, applying an interpretation to it, and reflecting back the insights that we gain as we learn about your business.
Practically, we support this practice through our highly secure, AI-powered company knowledge base to capture and organize the information you share with us about your business. This includes key people, processes, and systems that you divulge (under NDA, of course), and this information is retained for as long as you require our services. This allows us to truly act as a team and to ask better and better questions, building on what we already know. Nothing goes “in one ear, out the other” or stays trapped in a knowledge silo.
We also frequently share and export this repository with our clients, creating an extremely valuable deliverable in the form of documentation. Clients sometimes find that we understand a process or KPI better than any one person in their business. This is a natural byproduct of having an outside perspective and requiring data from across business processes. When that happens its our job to educate the right people and make our clients the experts on their own business.
There are more elements to knowing our client. These will be covered in more detail in the Analyze post.
Analytics can answer so many questions. The value of these answers can range from “mission critical” to “nice to know”, and sometimes the value of the answer is in the quality of the next question that you can ask.
If we are “to give our clients better ways to see and use information, so they can focus on what matters most”, we must know what matters most. This means that our framework must ensure that we are focusing on the highest-impact and achievable opportunities.
Behaviorally, that means you will frequently hear us coming back to restate the purpose of any project. You should hear us frequently coming back to these questions to make sure that they are clear to all stakeholders:
You will also hear us ask about the value of a problem and working to put a specific economic valuation, measured in dollars, for each potential analytics effort.
If we are “to give our clients better ways to see and use information, so they can focus on what matters most”, we must know what matters most.
Practically, we apply the Agile concepts of the Product Backlog and Product Roadmap to think of each analytics solution as a feature of your analytics capability. The backlog is force-ranked to ensure that the concept of value and priority is visually obvious and that the core idea of value is not lost. Our clients also tend to have more good ideas than can be immediately achieved; this is normal. The backlog allows the breadth to capture these valuable ideas and keep thinking expansively, yet to systematically execute with focus on the most valuable idea.
Deliverables are then captured as epics complete with a Project Value Proposal that all stakeholders can review and endorse. This allows us to set clear goals for a deliverable. It shortens the time to delivery because we begin with the end in mind and can always go back to understand the original intended benefits of a deliverable.
Experience has taught us that while individuals can have success over short periods, long-term success requires the commitment of a team supported by process. This learning is what led to the creation of the FASD framework.
Any team requires well-defined roles and responsibilities. I’ll talk about the four key roles below - more can be covered in future posts. The team is made up of people both from FirstLight and from the client.
This person defines success for the engagement. They frequently control the budget for the project and can defined priorities. They often play the critical role of connecting resources and people from across the organization. Internally, they are also ultimately accountability for the perceived success of the project at your company. Common titles for this person are Director or C-level executives. Note: If you are still reading this post, it might be you!
This person becomes FirstLight’s primary point of contact for the project and can help set priorities within project execution. They own setting priorities for items on the backlog. They also tend to have a deeper level of technical or subject matter expertise. Responsibility to execute the project is often delegated to this person from the Project Sponsor. In same cases, the Product Owner and Project Sponsor are the same person.
This person’s job is to clarify the value and requirements for success of all project activities. In that role, their activities are often those associated with titles like Business Analyst and Scrum Master. They are responsible for making sure that the Backlog and Roadmap are up to date, and that requirements are clearly identified that can be executed by the project team. The Project Manager stays “heads up” talking to and engaging with the client frequently. They also make sure that deliverables align with larger project and client goals.
This person leads the Project Team in design, execution, and delivery of the solution. They are responsible to design and deliver high-quality solutions that meet the requirements that you define. They plan technical tasks that they then execute while simultaneously coordinating other team members and resources. They are also responsible to plan sprints that ensure value is always being created and results are consistently being delivered. Their role is to be “heads down” and “hands on”.
The FirstLight Analytics Service Delivery Framework (FASD) is designed by people, for people, to achieve meaningful business results through analytics. By having a systematic yet flexible approach, we can create real results in spite of changing conditions and priorities and do so within realistic constraints. Our approach to projects is an outgrowth of who we are, and we want all of our clients to know us just as we get to know them.
The FASD Framework is designed by people, for people, to achieve meaningful business results through analytics.
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