Using Analytics to Circumvent Growing Pains

A company in crisis is not a fun place to be. Unfortunately, the reality is that it is impossible to avoid crises. Finding a way to get out of them is the hallmark of an effective leader. When growing pains hit, the leader (regardless of whether their title is CEO, Chairman, President, etc.) needs to find a way to marshall the company’s resources and guide it through the rough waters. One of the ways that you can navigate these challenges effectively is through analytics.

At this point, it is important that you answer the following question before moving forward: how does your company utilize analytics? If your company does not have an analytics team (or analyst), why not? It is possible that this is one of the keys to helping your company get through the growing pains. After all, there is a wealth of information that analytics can unveil, much of which might point out to us what issues need to be fixed.

If you do have an analytics team, consider the possibility of determining if there are any insights that were missed that could be helpful in getting the organization out of the situation. Unfortunately, if the miss was because of oversights by the analytics team, difficult assessments might need to be made. Hopefully, it was because of changes in trends that were to blame, and that things were not adjusted properly fast enough. Another possibility is that the analytics team really could use another analyst or two, helping spread the load out a bit better so that no oversights happen.

Regardless of what the situation is, one thing is clear, analytics team or not, analytics will provide useful information in helping things turn around. The easiest scenario would be if you lack an analytics team, since it would be easy to bring in analysts. There would undoubtedly be a great deal of low hanging fruit that these analysts would be able to address skillfully. It is quite possible that this might help fix quite a few of the issues.

The challenge here with analytics is realizing that these hard skills will provide correct answers. The problem is that these answers are very much like the images that one can see with a telescope. You can get impressive images, as well as focus on specific areas, but in order for it to work properly, you need to be aiming in the right area. Analytics can provide substantial depth, but if you are not pointing in the right direction (especially if you do not have an analytics team), you will be incapable of getting the right answer.

This brings us to the hardest part of this article. If you have an analytics team and being stretched to the limit is not the problem, then your leadership team needs to have some difficult conversations about addressing why your analytics team missed information. Was it because of leadership on the team? Was it because the team was unaware of shifts? Were they not getting sufficient data?

There are a lot of difficult questions that need to be asked, and there is the possibility that you will find answers that are difficult. Hopefully, you will not need to let anyone go due to mismanagement. However, if this is where the information points, it is important to make the difficult decision. With hard skills such as analytics, it is very difficult to sidestep misses that could have been avoidable, especially if they could have been avoided.

Of course, there is the possibility that the analytics team has nothing to do with the reasons you are experiencing growing pains as an organization. This is a possibility, but experience would point at this situation being highly unlikely. The most likely situation being faced is either an understaffed or a non existent analytics team.

In conclusion, getting your analytics fixed will be key to helping your organization get through challenges. If you do not have an analytics team in place, then get one. If you have one, then fix it. If you need more people, better details, etc., determine where the analytics failed and fix it. While this won’t necessarily solve all of the problems, it might help you start going the right direction