Project Management and Information Management professional, Liselle Ramcharan-Briscoe, continues the data adventure by sharing with us how best to prepare when executing projects, and to better position ourselves and our team for their successful completion.
Although this is changing, one of the greatest challenges that you face as a data management professional (or as the person responsible for making sense of the data for your company) is convincing your company about the importance of data. As a result, putting the necessary infrastructure in place for data to be effectively and efficiently captured, and used, can be difficult. Many do not understand that when done right, quality data can actually directly improve the company’s bottom line. This is where it is important for you to show “quick wins”.
It is a journey
When it comes to data, the reality is that companies, with a focus on building their business (rightly so –the core business pays for everything else) often do not place attention to how data is captured, stored and used in the business as a continuous chain, thus appreciating the interdependencies. There are some assumptions naturally made. For example, that the customer service representative who is capturing their customers’ email addresses will always pay close attention to entering the email addresses correctly in the company’s customer management system during that telephone call. Or from another perspective, that the customer, who is actually the contact person for a key client, will always stay with that company or in that position during the lifetime of their relationship with their client.
Why highlight something as simple as an email address? When you need to send an important update to your entire customer base, and you rely on email addresses, having the right email address becomes critical to your success. Often, the customer service representative does not see that correctly collecting customer details, in this case, an email address, affects the company’s ability to build a business relationship with that customer.
When you consider data, and how it is captured, it is a journey to map it out for your company. This becomes more involved as your company grows, and no attention has been paid to managing data. Hence, when you do stop and take the time to explore your data, it can look as if you are trying to summit a mountain like Mt. Everest – complicated and riddled with numerous challenges – and as such, it makes it seem like it is impossible to complete.
How is it managed?
Let’s consider what that journey ends up looking like when you want to get an end result for your company. The larger your company, the more likely that conquering your mountain morphs from being a simple project to a complex program that is comprised of many projects that have interdependencies. This unfortunately means that you can be looking at 5 years before your company sees all of the benefits. But it does not have to be so: that is why “quick wins” are so important.
In my last article, the concept of a “green field” project was raised. Although the challenges faced in your journey to improve the management of data in all organisations remain the same, the individual activities and initiatives required for your company to implement the project can be quite unique. For these kinds of “green field” projects, it is important to have “quick wins”
The importance of “quick wins”
In identifying the requirements for your data project or program, there may be some “low hanging fruit” that you can harvest. Having conceptualised your project or program, based on properly captured and well-considered requirements (at least as best as is collectively understood at that point), you can develop a proper plan that outlines how to move forward. In developing your plan, you may discover that there are some activities that you can quickly implement, even though the project itself may take 5 years to be completely implemented.
If we develop our email address example, you might decide that you can quickly implement a campaign that encourages the customer service representative to validate the email address that they have on file when a customer calls in. You might consider implementing a simple update to the application used to capture the email address that validates the format of the email address being entered by the customer service representative. These activities may take a couple of months to develop and execute, but you may see immediate results by the reduced number of rejected emails, for example. There are metrics that you can identify and use to measure success.
You have a “quick win” so momentum is not lost. The company, in the case of the improved email addresses, sees an immediate result that has a positive impact on business productivity. The “quick win” also promotes the company’s understanding of what your innovative data project is trying to achieve, and so you have an opportunity to increase the excitement for, and the desire to, support the project. This can even result in your requirements for the project/program becoming more robust.
Business pains and quick wins
With “quick wins”, a couple of the key criteria you should be looking at in identifying them are:
- Do they eliminate a business pain?
- Can they be resolved in under a year?
My simplistic definition of a business pain is that it is an issue within your company that tends to get a lot of attention. If one of these is linked to a fundamental flaw with the capture and use of data, and you are able to quickly resolve it by improving data, you can well appreciate the momentum that would be gained for your project if you were the one who solved it!
Parting thoughts
When you are working towards improving the data in your company, it takes time. The larger the company, the more time it may take, based on the considerations that were first put in place to capture data. However, it is still your unique journey. Surprisingly, data does not excite everyone in the same way, but you can gain their appreciation by quickly showing the benefits through “quick wins” with a focus on solving business pains that keep the senior management team up at night!
Image credit: Pixabay (Pexels)
Great points once again. Indeed “data is king”, its collection and integrity can enrich the CRM system or completely render it worthless. This takes me back to my days in retail and the peculiar challenge of management of correct data collection at the Point of Sale ( not by a well-trained customer service team ).
The challenge with data collection was not so much with the email address, but rather the customer’s phone number. It was vital to capture the contact phone number on specific products like printers etc because you needed to contact them back to up-sell them on consumables like ink cartridges, toners etc.
But also, by capturing the phone number, a specially trained team can then contact them to carefully extract even more definitive data for marketing and CRM. Therefore, collecting accurate phone number was very critical.
But the phone number has a series of possible permutations when a customer shouts it out across a Point of Sale: do you include a country code, an STD code, is it a mobile phone number or a land line etc. What if the customer is just passing through town from another region, another country even… This information when collected by shop-floor, customer-facing, check-out operators ( who may even be casual employees ), used to descend into a Cinderella of data management fairy-tale.
Thank you Kamutula! I appreciate your feedback. You have provided another key example of a simple but important piece of information that when addressed can make a huge difference. In the case of the phone number, based on what you can afford, you may consider automatically populating the area code based on the country/city selection. Forcing a format for the phone number entry. Putting a checkbox for customers who are willing to say that they are transitory so that entering the phone number becomes optional. And a simpler approach may be to teach the reps the importance of collecting the phone number so that better care is taken in collecting it. Even considering the noise and configuration at the point of sale area to allow easier conversation.