Have you heard of the Performance Manager book? If not, you should take a look at it! The Performance Manager is a book that can provide a lot of value to you and your Business Analytics projects. Some people describe it as a ‘Recipe book for Analytics’. Mike Duncan recently blogged about designing dashboards and selecting the right KPIs. The Performance Manager publication is a great tool to help you with that.
THE RECIPE
First of all, the Performance Manager is not necessarily a book that you read from the first page to the last. No, it is rather a smart compendium that you pull out when you need it. The basic idea of the book is to provide the readers with deep insights and ideas about the type of goals, metrics and responsibilities they need to think about when designing new reports, dashboards and planning templates. The book is structured around the eight primary functions of a typical business (Finance, Marketing, Sales, etc..).
Business Analytics is the number topic for most CFOs and CIOs this year. Fall is a perfect time to catch up on the latest news in this area and to learn about the latest and greatest IBM solutions. The IBM teams across the globe (including my group) are currently busy organizing and preparing four major events and workshop series. If you are currently using business analytics or are evaluating it, you should definitely make time to attend one or more of these events. There will be a big focus on Cognos 10, Cognos Customer Insight and SPSS.
Business Analytics Forum: This event is big – IBM’s annual user conference for the Cognos, SPSS and other related products. The Forum is once again hosted at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas. It kicks off on October 24th and runs through the 27th. The conference offers hundreds of sessions about the technology, business best practices and customer stories. There are also certification camps, EXPOs, focus groups and much more. This year we will see a special track dedicated to social media. I personally highly value the opportunity to network at this annual event. This is always a special opportunity. If you have time and budget to attend, you should sign-up soon – early-bird registration ends on August 31st! Make sure to also check out Delaney Turner’s blog post about this event.
IBM Performance: If you cannot attend BA Forum, I would highly recommend to sign up for one of the Performance events. They belong to my favorite roadshows. These are 1-2 day complimentary events hosted across the globe. Sessions and solution showcases help you evaluate, use and derive more value from IBM solutions for business analytics. There will be a lot of demos and information about IBM Cognos 10, along with solutions from SPSS, Clarity and Netezza. I will deliver a bunch of keynotes and presentations across Europe.
Business Analytics Experience: Have you ever participated in a business simulation? This is the perfect opportunity! The Business Analytics Experience workshop allows you to run a fictitious company called Future Chips. Together with other attendees, you will analyze the business, develop plans and fine-tune specific parameters such as pricing, marketing tactics etc.. The workshop is a lot of fun and really let’s you experience what it means to fully leverage business analytics. You can find out more about this in a prior post on this blog. The complimentary workshops are run across Europe and North America.
Best Practices in Action: Being successful with business analytics requires more than just technology. You also need to implement business best practices such as rolling forecasts, driver-based planning and such. Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have therefore developed a bunch of workshops that focus on sharing a lot of proven practices and how to best get started with implementing them. This fall we will focus on Rolling Forecasts, Budgeting and Dashboard Design. You can find out about the upcoming schedule on the Speaking & Events page on this blog. I will update that page as soon as the schedule has been confirmed. You can also find some additional information about these type of workshops on this blog.
A few months ago, I sat right next to a guy on a plane. Once we were up in the air, he pulled out a big stack of paper reports. He equipped himself with a ruler, a marker, a pencil and a calculator. All that on the tiny fold-down table in economy class. Didn’t look like fun. But to be fair, most planes still do not offer WIFI and we still have to get our work done. So, what is the alternative to paper reports? PDF is ok, but it is impossible to interact with the data. Excel is ok, too. But Excel is not secure and potentially too complicated. And none of these options are suited for building effective management dashboards.
OFFLINE MANAGEMENT DASHBOARDS
What can we do then? IBM introduced IBM Cognos Active Report with the latest Cognos 10 release. It basically allows report authors to develop interactive management dashboards and reporting applications for offline use. (more…)
Demos are a critical part of every business analytics implementation. There are frequent occasions during any project where we have to show present tools & processes: At the beginning, we might show the new software to our users to educate them. Later on we might want to review a prototype and we need to solicit productive feedback based on the demo. Training sessions require us to teach the new process and tool while also obtaining buy-in from the business. Overall, I would argue that being able to deliver a great demo is a critical skill for every business analytics professional.
The 2011 edition of the Tour de France is in its final week. No matter if you are a cycling fan or not, Le Tour continues to fascinate millions of people around the globe. Few people appreciate that it is actually one of the three largest sporting events in the world (behind the Olympics and the football world cup). Fewer people know why we get to watch this interesting show every year.
This past weekend, my friend Bernhard took me to an amazing place in the Bavarian Alps. High up in the mountains above the famous town of Berchtesgaden you will find a small colony of actors. No, not your normal type of actor. Actually, birds of prey. Yes, there is a guy up there who works with eagles, owls and vultures. He cares for them and trains them for movie productions. And he opens up his small but amazing operation for people.
To be honest with you, I am still a bit puzzled. But it totally makes sense. Over the past 9 weeks, I ran into three different people that I had met through my work at IBM. They all had three things in common:
They used to be a Business Analytics advocate and driver at a customer
They left that job to pursue another opportunity with a new company
They hate their new jobs and are looking for a new role
“Projects could be so much fun if it wasn’t for the users.” Well, I have often heard this from different project teams. And there is some truth to this: Too many projects fail to ‘wow’ an organization because the business is disappointed about the final results. Based on my personal experience, I believe that the traditional implementation approaches are partially responsible for that.
Do you know your AQ? AQ stands for Analytical Quotient. It is a new measure that provides you with insights about your organization’s ability to leverage business analytics. Most importantly, AQ helps you determine how to best go about improving your capabilities. I would highly recommend taking the self-assessment test on the IBM Website. It takes just a few minutes and provides you with very interesting feedback and ideas.
FOUR STAGES & THE NOVICE
IBM found that organizations typically go through four stages with their business analytics programs: Novice, Builder, Leader & Master. Companies that belong to the Novice category are still stuck in a spreadsheet world. And that can be a big problem. Spreadsheets are a great productivity tool, but they are not the right tool for managing your business. That raises the question: what exactly is the problem with being at the Novice stage? Let’s take a look at the Finance department as an example.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH SPREADSHEETS?
A few years ago, my team started conducting some surveys amongst finance professionals. For this purpose we teamed up with David Axson (co-founder of the Hackett Group, book author). We specifically went after professionals that were not using Performance Management software, yet (i.e. organizations that belong to the Novice category). One of the key things we were interested in was the type of work finance professionals do in these organizations. It quickly appeared that there were five major categories of work. The results from our survey looked like this:
Cognos Finance Survey 2008
The majority of the time is spent on manual tasks such as collecting data (loading data from systems into spreadsheets, copying & pasting, manually entering budgeting numbers, etc..), maintaining spreadsheets (developing worksheets, fixing formulas, aggregating spreadsheet data, Visual Basic programming etc.) and then also developing reports & presentations (creating spreadsheet reports, graphs, Powerpoints etc.). Only about 20% of the overall time is spent on the high-value tasks such as performing in-depth analysis, running what-if scenarios, personal development etc.. A shocking but not a surprising picture. When we present the results to finance professionals we get a lot of head-nods. But I often sense a certain level of resignation as well (“Oh yeah….I know….that’s just the way it is.”).
A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PICTURE
Statistics are always a bit dry. So we took the data and applied the percentage distribution to a work week. The picture now looks quite interesting. What do you think?
Cognos Finance Survey 2008 – part 2
How does this feel? Same numbers. Just a different perspective. Two key questions come to mind: Can we live with that situation? Would we want to live with this situation? I doubt it. I have been there and didn’t necessarily like this. Sure, it’s nice to play around with spreadsheets knowing that you are indispensable. But is that what we want to get out of our professional lives? Is that why we went to business school? Is that why we spent so many hours studying for the CPA, CMA, CFA exams? This what being at the Novice stage can feel like.
MOVING TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Technology helps shift this picture around tremendously. Business analytics can help you make a lot more time for the important things. What do you think about these insights? Are you familiar with this situation? I would love to hear your thoughts and about your own experiences.
“Make sure the teams get to know each other! It’s a lot easier to collaborate once you have had a drink together.” That was the ubiquitous advice from my former boss. We were discussing some communication problems related to a large international project. Some team members on a global project were running into some issues. Most people had never met each other. Communication suffered and it was starting to show in the results. Not a big surprise: Effective communication is vital for success and it is therefore always listed as a critical success factor. Interacting and working with people we do not know is especially difficult.
WHO ARE YOU?
Many projects bring people from different places or organizations together. And it is a challenge for project managers and sponsors to build teams around people that have just met. To start this process many people either resort to elaborate introduction rounds or sometimes even games. (I remember once putting my right hand on the shoulder of a colleague while looking him in his eyes for three straight minutes….it was an interesting experience and that’s about it) But a lot of these efforts fall short in expectations: we do not get to know the other person and we are utterly bored.
A SIMPLY SIMPLE BUT AWESOME IDEA
The other day, I attended one of those infamous project kick offs at the global headquarters of a successful German company. We were about 15 people from different parts of the world. To be honest, I was dreading the common introduction round (“Hello my name is Tom and I work out of the ABC office.”). But to my surprise, the project manager dimmed the lights and launched a series of short videos. Believe it or not, each and every one of the attendees had recorded a simple video about themselves, their offices and their colleagues. Within a few minutes we were taken on an interesting and fun journey through their Hong Kong, Sydney, Munich and Beijing offices. We got to learn about their teams, we saw their offices, we learned a few things about their lives. Most importantly, all of the videos revealed something about the personalities behind the people. And it worked: the atmosphere in the room was great and energized. And the videos stuck: Just this morning, I found myself thinking about some of them. I will never forget these great people and it almost feels like I have known them for a while.
TAKE OUT YOUR CAMERA
How do you like that idea? I will definitely try this next time I kick-off a project with different new faces. Remember: It doesn’t have to be fancy. Any camera or smartphone will do to record something decent. Show your new team mates your offices, tell them about your self. All this requires very little effort. Keep it short and sweet. Have fun with it! Get to know your team from a new and fresh angle. It’s these fun moments that can really help build teams. So, take out your camera now!
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