Focused Delivery Through Data Visualization

The primary focus of this article is discuss efficiency gains brought forth by data storytelling, but as you will read throughout, this article is more than that. This is a positive case study for meaningful change. The type of change that can only be achieved by listening to those around you and taking into account the viewpoints and experiences of the team in order to make the organization a better place.

...it takes leadership who is willing to listen before making decisions.

Leaders cannot mandate meaningful change and we cannot single-handedly decide how change is carried out. Change takes time, it takes commitment, it takes investment, it takes alignment, but above all, it takes leadership who is willing to listen before making decisions.

I am a huge proponent for data storytelling. Visualizing data transforms aggregated figures into actionable information. In order to bring out the full value in a data set, you should be visualizing it. If you're looking at a thousand rows and columns in Excel for instance, that’s data. If you’re looking at a dashboard view of that exact same content, now you’re talking about information. They are different. Data gives us vast amounts of facts and figures, but information gives us the usable detail we need to achieve positive results. A refining process takes place before data is augmented into a visualization. As you're compiling what you need to present visual statistics, you'll be transforming your source material from raw data, to sorted data, to arranged data, and finally visually presented information. There are a plethora of tools (and companies) who will help you do this, but I have found Google Data Studio and Microsoft Power BI to be some of the best. If you have not used these tools before, you'll find they have a moderate learning curve, and if you have worked with business intelligence solutions before, Data Studio and Power BI are easy to pick up.

When I was given the opportunity to manage my former team, I saw space early on to help us increase our productivity. It took me about six weeks to settle into my new role and about twelve weeks to make any changes with how the team operated. At that time I was reading The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins and was well aware that I was a consumer of resource and not a contributor. My goal was to start contributing as quickly as possible. There was a lot of groundwork laid by former leadership and I was given a lot of creative flexibility to take that foundation to the next level. Within those first twelve weeks I spent a lot of time on focused discovery. I traveled and met face-to-face with each of my team members and gathered their input. This included things they enjoyed about their work, what was working as a team, what wasn’t, and just simply getting to know them as people. What I found was there was a silent productivity killer among the team that was derailing delivery. Meetings. 

A byproduct of purposeful change was increased autonomy.

Drag is a force that you can’t see, but you feel it when it’s there. The more resistance we can remove from our daily work, the more throughput we are able to handle as a team, and in turn, increase our output and delivery. Too many team meetings had created drag around our team's work. I took time to plan what the future of our meeting space looked like, how it could work, and if it would be efficient. I recommended that we reduce meeting time by 50%, and if I wanted that to stick, I had to demonstrate that we could actually meet less and continue to stay focused. A byproduct of purposeful change was increased autonomy. Choosing to lead by providing a greater level of autonomy allowed us to hit a “magic” zone where the team’s passion for their work and the purpose of their delivery intersected to help us find success. Not only that, it proved to be sustainable over time. It also required visualizing our metrics in a way that brought clarity to what we were tracking and why it mattered.

We now had greater resource availability (time), but we needed a way to ensure the time we freed up gave us something in return and we had to be able to quantify it. Was it simply the ability to do more or was it the ability to consistently deliver on commitments through accurate planning? The answer being somewhere in the middle. Simply doing more, and more, and more, eventually leads to burnout. Consistently hitting targets week over week may look good on paper but are we doing enough? Are we focused on the right things? The answer is in the middle. It's a balance.

Current state knowledge tells you about the work, trend analysis tells you about patterns in the work.

A coroner determines manner of death, while a doctor seeks to improve health over time by targeting the root cause of an ailment. Prior to visualizing our data, we were coroners retrospectively assessing if we hit our goals or not. There was nothing we could do except say “We’ll do better next week” or "We did great, let's keep it up." Presenting team and individual metrics in a visual way gave us the ability to see where we were headed, not just where we had been, and we could course-correct as needed. Dashboards shouldn’t include everything under the sun. Data visualization is about extracting and presenting relevant details needed to take action. A jam-packed dashboard becomes unhelpful when it’s overly stuffed with content. I tend to build visuals with two things in mind; what do we need to see now to stay productive and what do we need to know about in order to make decisions for the future? Current state knowledge tells you about the work, trend analysis tells you about patterns in the work. It's then up to leaders to take strategic action on what the information is telling them.

Within an organization there are four phases of maturity within a support team. Those being Reactive, Proactive, Customer-Centric, and Business-Centric. These four phases are broken down into two categories of Tactical (Reactive and Proactive) and Strategic (Customer-Centric and Business-Centric). The insight gained from data visualization is helping us to become more customer-centric. This is where we are able to anticipate the needs of our customers by making strategic and compelling recommendations regarding solutions and support. By leveraging what information is telling us to make decisions, we’re able to bring greater value to our customers and the organization.

Be mindful of why you are invoking change.

In 2018, the team’s plan accuracy for the year closed at 76%. In 2019, 73%. In a few short weeks we will conclude our first quarter of 2020 and we are on track to end Q1 with an outstanding 89% accuracy rate. This means that we are planning better, delivering on commitments, building relationships, and supporting our customers with excellence. It's not easy, there is no magic formula, and it takes time to prove out. The results however, are worth every bit of the work put in. Be mindful of why you are invoking change. When done methodically and with purpose, you and your team can represent a paradigm shift within your organization and will be a catalyst for positive growth and maturity.