Building a Data Management & Analytics Strategy

CASE STUDY – Building a Data Management & Analytics Strategy

Findorff is a $900M construction company based in Madison, WI. Their focus is conducting large-scale commercial and residential building projects. Given the change in the economic market, along with their steady growth, Findorff recognized the need to better leverage data and analytics to optimize job profitability, construction forecasting, labor productivity, and marketing & sales opportunities. Following an evaluation process, they decided to leverage the Analytics TO WIN® method to establish a data management and analytics strategy.

The Findorff team followed the Four-Step method and leveraged the pre-built assessments and templates to engage executive leadership, IT leadership and key functions of the business. This ensured the resulting data management and analytics strategy was developed collaboratively, with all three core business stakeholder groups having their needs addressed.

The Decision-Making & Data-Driven Culture assessment was invaluable. It generated much-needed awareness at the executive level about how decisions are made and about the maturity of their data-driven culture. It also provided a structured forum to confirm the corporate objectives, and raised awareness about their strategic data objectives (how is data provisioned, where it is stored, who has access, how it is used in decision-making). The session also helped identify what is needed to enable improvements in how they use data (data quality, availability, retention, etc.). The data and analytics team also took the same assessment and compared their results to the leadership results. This comparison exercise created a no-lose situation – i.e., if aligned, it would expedite next steps… if not, it would help bridge the gap between the data team and leadership to avoid delays. It also made sure that data initiatives were set to support the whole company, and both leadership and departmental leaders were aligned on priorities for maximum impact.

The Findorff team found the Analytics TO WIN® method to be very adaptable, and accommodated the company’s emerging strategic planning process (timing, personnel, input from leadership, IT and all business functions). It eliminated departmental subjectivity/bias via cross-functional consensus, established priorities and prerequisites, balanced load, and drove executive buy-in and approval. It increased confidence in the company’s ability to succeed and became the consistent reference point for measuring progress across all departments in the organization. The result of the Analytics TO WIN® method was a Strategy Matrix that clearly prioritized the most important data management and analytics initiatives. Each initiative was clearly aligned to their data-related strategic objectives, which were aligned to their overall corporate objectives. The data team was
also able to use the Strategy Matrix to prioritize some projects to achieve quick-wins to build early momentum. The Strategy Matrix was presented back to the leadership team on a single page that made it easy for the leadership to understand and approve the first set of key initiatives.

The data team at Findorff is now engaged in executing the prioritized initiatives from the Analytics TO WIN® Strategy Matrix and is already seeing success with the business

 

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