In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I showed how to convert your old, useless SDR into a new one that incorporates business requirements, objectives and scores for each requirement so you can see where you stand in terms of meeting the analytics needs of your stakeholders. In many cases, the overall percentage of business requirements that can be addressed today will be low. That is often due to either data quality issues in existing variables or because new requirements were identified that don’t yet have data points. Luckily, the hard work you have put in so far will pay dividends by helping you determine your current development needs.
If you have come up with insightful, new business requirements and have a need to fix existing items in your implementation, there may be a large amount of implementation work in your future. For many organizations, this can be stressful since it means that tagging is needed which usually means working with your internal development team. In general, I suggest that you start by identifying what you need to be implemented and then tackle these new items in phases. Start by using your new SDR to identify which new data points will knock out the greatest number of business requirements or the higher priority ones. This will allow you to get the most bang for your buck out of your development resources.
Let’s use an example using the new SDR we have created over the last few posts. If you want to be able to answer the highest priority requirements, you can filter the sheet to only show items that are a 1 or 2 priority and then hide any items that have a score of 4. In our sample sheet, that would show us this:
Here we can see that the first two items have the data points needed, but there are some issues with the data that need to be fixed. The remaining three items look like they need brand new data points to be added. Therefore, if we want to be able to tell our bosses that we can answer all 1 and 2 priority items, we know exactly what we need from our development team. In this case, it looks like we need them to help fix some onsite search data points and to implement new data points in the area of real-time chat. Having this information is useful in helping your development team determine which resources are needed and to see when they may be available to help. While this may sound trivial, one of the worst things you can do to development teams is ask for resources and not provide any guidance on what work is needed. But by leveraging the scoring and auditing you performed in past posts, you can now have a reasonable dialog with your development team and hopefully ease the way to getting their assistance.
Action Items
Your task for this post is to identify what items you think would most help your team meet the needs of the organization. To do this you will:
- Make sure you have scores and priorities for all of your business requirements
- Filter your sheet in a way that makes sense to your team to identify which items are most important to fix or implement next
- Begin a conversation with your development team to discuss resources and timelines
In the next post, I will share my advice on making sure you know exactly HOW to implement any new items needed in your implementation.
