Stakeholder engagement – your primary purpose

Your primary role and that of your analytics team is to engage with stakeholders, including executives, sponsors, and subject matter experts, to understand their challenges and problems; translate those challenges into analytical applications and models; build those applications and models; prove that the new data-driven approach delivers superior operational results on a reliable and repeatable basis when compared to the previous approach; convince the executives, sponsors, and subject matter experts to adopt the innovations and changes; document and communicate success to sponsors and executives; and then to do it again and again, on repeat. This is the stakeholder engagement process. The stakeholder engagement process is illustrated below in Figure 9.1.

The stakeholder engagement cycle/process is at the core of why the executives gave the approval to fund you and your team. You need to know and understand that the execution...