Prioritizing work with a centralized data science team

We were joined by Jay Sewell, Director of Analytics at Harry Rosen. Focused on plugging data into decisions and actions.

Ok, who else can resonate with the part about having too many reports?

Snippet from the conversation: We did an audit and we had 1,000 different reports that we had to migrate.

Rather than migrating all 1,000 reports where we couldn’t see who was using them – we developed this technique where we ask people:

Ok, you use this report…show me how you make a business decision from the data in this report.

A good question to ask is: Imagine you pulled this up, and I said “Oh no, I just found out all this data is wrong and I gave you all new numbers that you’ve never seen before. How does your week change? How does your month change?”

Are you doing something different now that I’ve shown you new numbers?

If you can’t reasonably convince me that you week or month has changed because the report was wrong, it’s a useless report and we should not be looking at it.

We’re trying to get at plugging information into actions and decisions and stripping down reports that aren’t doing that. If you’re just looking at a report to pass on some information to someone else who is going to pass that on, it’s time to go.