It was an awesome week. I received my foreword from Randy Bean, CEO of NewVantage, for my book Data Insights Delivered. I'm grateful for his support and encouragement.

"Data Insights Delivered is ultimately a book about taking responsibility. It is a tale of leadership, and how data leaders can and must step up to deliver business value to their organizations. Villagran offers 7 common sense lessons learned based on hard-won experience gained over time by a seasoned data practitioner. She remarks, “Data teams get a bad reputation. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way out, and it’s simpler than you expect”. This is Villagran’s “battle-tested guide”, filled with lessons learned, chock full of wisdom, and told through anecdotal stories drawn from her experiences. Villagran’s goal is to transform data leaders into trusted business partners. She has outlined the path. We would now all be wise to listen and to learn from her experiences."

Why Are We Obsessed Over Useless KPIs and ROIs in Data Analytics?

It’s been a constant struggle to manage non-technical executives with strong technical opinions.

“Let’s track our productivity by how many dashboards our data teams can produce this year.”

Some track the success of a dashboard or a data science project by how many decisions were made based on it.

These activity-driven metrics can’t show the true value of data teams. The issue here is you’re measuring the wrong things, not that data professionals shouldn’t be held responsible for their products.

So how do you measure the value of your data teams then?

The solution is a lot simpler than you think.

Take the checkpoint approach.

Talk to Your Stakeholders

Ask your stakeholders how they’ve benefited from the products your data teams produced.

• Do the data teams ask for feedback?

• Have they delivered things you need?

• Are they prompt to respond to you?

• Have they helped you along the way, figuring out what’s necessary in your projects to make things happen?

Tempted by Useless Metrics

People might be put off by this human approach and consider it as an unscalable one, wanting to go back to the useless metrics.

Again, when do you go to a meeting where people are counting how many decisions they make based on a data product?

Are the winners in data analytics the people who know how to make the coolest dashboards or know the newest machine learning model?

No.

Who is the winner then?

The winners are the people who know how to package all business value into the final deliverables.

The metrics issue is also an emotional-driven phenomenon. It’s as if people are afraid of living by the principle of things, using their own judgment. They desire the rigid framework to frame their success, eliminating all possible errors.

However, even if you beat all the metrics, that doesn’t mean you’re good at your job because it’s just a checklist.

People can participate in meetings, actively answering and listening. That doesn’t make them competent until they actually deliver something.

Your data team can produce 10 crappy dashboards instead of one high-quality one.

Let’s Think About This Obsession Even Deeper

If someone asks you to justify your value, you’ve already lost.

They already don’t think you’re valuable, and you’re just a cost center to them.

What you need to do is to get to the bottom of this.

• Where did the trust and connection disappear?

• Was it from lack of regular communication?

• Was it from lack of engagement with your stakeholders?

• Have you been asking for feedback regularly?

If anything can broadcast your value louder than some useless metrics, it’ll be your stakeholders and end users.

Let your stakeholders vouch for you.

Build a strong relationship with them and gain their trust.

You’ll never need to prove your worth again.

That’s what matters.

There is never going to be a better time to learn the foundations of data analytics - data engineering. Check out the newsletter below from my friend, Sarah Floris.

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Besides writing about data project management, I also write novels. I recently discovered this Podcast by Jim Woods. I asked him how to find an editor. He recorded a short episode to answer my question. I'm just impressed by people's kindness online!

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