Change management

An aspect of analytics that is routinely ignored or overlooked is the leveraging of results or insights to deliver an improvement in operations either as a one-time modification to a process or as a permanent change on a continual basis. Implied in any process of improvement is change. One of the hardest things for people to understand, plan for, internalize, accept, and benefit from, is change.

Change of all types presents challenges for managers and for staff members. Leaving the realization that change is a required element of a complete and successful analytics project as an implied aspect of the project rather than making it an explicit agreement within the project framework leaves open the possibility for a significant mismatch in expectations between the analytics team and the functional team. All teams that need to be involved in implementing the many incremental changes required to realize the value of the overall analytics project need to be explicitly...