Your Data Project The Four Key Steps To Prepare It

With the explosion of  Big Data, data is now more than ever at the heart of business concerns. They are a capital resource for monitoring, managing and optimizing their daily activity. This is why data projects are multiplying. Do you want to launch one in your company to facilitate your management? Discover the four critical steps of a data project to prepare yours properly.

Step 1: Identify Project Objectives

One may be tempted to complete this step quickly to get down to business. But it would help if you took the time to make your goals clear. Because without a clear plan, how to calculate the return on investment of the project? So what questions do you want to answer through this project? It can, for example, be:

1. How can we reduce our operational costs?
2. Who are our most profitable customers by region?
3. What is the quality of our customer experience?

These issues will, of course, be directly linked to your business strategy.

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Step 2: Set The Framework For Your Data Project

The guiding thread of your data project is now fixed. It’s time to create the framework to get you started on a good foundation. 

1. What Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) do you give yourself to assess the success of your project? The percentage reduction in your costs to be achieved, for example. 
2. Who will be the project manager? Clearly define the IT project manager responsible for the project’s success. We advise you to rely on an experienced project manager.
3. Who will participate? Will it mobilize several of your teams or be mainly managed by your data scientists?
4. What will be the rights and responsibilities of each participant?
5. What budget do you have?
6. And what data management and data analytics tools do you have? 
7. How much time can you devote to it? Is this project urgent or not? 
8. How will you monitor the progress of the project (schedule, regular meetings, reports, collaborative tools, etc.)?

Step 3: Identify The Data Needed

You are now at the 3rd step of preparing your data project. Now that you know the objectives of your project, you need to think about the data you will need to carry out. The goal is to draw a clear map of your data. Ask yourself:  

1. Which members of your business teams do you need to mobilize to identify the data you will need? Marketing, finance, production? 
2. Which data is vital for your project and could be of additional help? 
3. Where is this data located? In databases, business software (ERP, CRM, CAPM, etc.), Excel files or other?
4. Do they need to be cleaned and modeled? 
5. How much data are we talking about?

Step 4: Choose Means That Meet Your Data Needs

This is the time for you to determine to what extent you will outsource your data project and what tools you will acquire. Comparing the expected return on investment (or ROI) to the cost of different solutions can help you decide which is correct.

1. You can recruit a data scientist or even a data project manager if it is a large-scale and long-term data project.
2. If your project is short-term or it’s not time for you to recruit data experts, you can outsource your project. You can call on a specialized external company to supervise and carry it out.