Your project began nearly 6 months ago. Your teams have pulled long weekends, late nights and supported round-the-clock fire drills. Your boss has re-evaluated the objective of your implementation and challenged the ROI of your project…twice. You successfully launched your redesigned site and analytics solution then frantically scrambled to fix all post-implementation issues in order to call your project complete. The timeline was met, the budget is nearly exhausted and so is your team. Now what?
The effort we put in to complete an on-time and on-budget implementation of an analytics tool is no small feat. The requirements continually change and the environment throws a few monkey wrenches into the works, but the end result is more insightful and more actionable data, such as the information shown in the graphic below, that allows you to do more with what you already had and ultimately increase your bottom line.
However the requirements and environmental shifts don’t end a week after “go-live.” As with nature, and all things in life, change is inevitable – staying ahead of that change is what makes a great solution even greater and makes you more effective in the long-run.
Governance is a word too scarcely used these days. The race to the finish line is what takes the spotlight but what comes after the finish line is equally important. You wouldn’t run a marathon only to stop right at the finish line – you run through it, take pride in what you’ve done, then rehydrate, stretch and condition the muscles you’ve just exhausted. The same must be done with your analytics solution. This is done with ongoing monitoring, maintenance, proactive enhancements, and custom KPIs and metrics.
Having watched so many project teams run the marathon then promptly sit on the curb, we’ve learned what a real governance strategy looks like and push our clients to adopt it as part of the solution, not the afterthought. The process of governance is simple – the execution and dedication is not. Just like an exercise regimen or diet plan you must know what your goal is and work hard to get there. However we’ve come up with a systematic methodology that makes your governance regimen a little easier to follow.
Step 1 – Validation
Validation is where the sweating begins and the step that too many companies have abandoned. Many back-end systems are touched by different departments and each time your code-base is altered you run the risk of breaking something. Ongoing validation of your analytics is a MUST. This can be done with a simple monthly ObservePoint scan or a more reliable method of manual, high-level regression testing. Both will take money and man-power but are necessary to ensure you continue to collect the data that is so precious to you and your team. This is also the time to setup reporting alerts so you automatically receive notifications when your data seems ‘fishy.’
Step 2 – Monitoring
Monitoring is easy and done almost effortlessly – but is still an important step of the methodology. This is a simple process of watching your data flow in and keeping tabs on your daily site or app traffic via reporting reviews and alerts research. This also includes ongoing validation via the step you’ve determined is sufficient during validation.
Step 3 – Analysis
Analysis of your newly executed metrics is an important and often times skipped step in the process. Again, we get wrapped up with getting to the finish line and forget to take pride in what we’ve done when we get there. Close assessment of your newly defined metrics is what gives you the ROI that your team or boss will be looking for. Take all of your hard work and make it visible and actionable in appealing reports and dashboards. The output of this step is not only wowing your audience but identifying opportunities for improvement.
Step 4 – Enhancement
Part of maintaining your solution is enhancing it – making sure that you’re keeping up with the rest of technology as well as your competitors. Our human nature is to continually want more, and you should apply this same thought process to your analytics. Requirements at kickoff are typically simple and straight forward. Now that you’re up and running it’s time to challenge your needs, wants and outcomes by adding custom – or ‘advanced’ – metrics and KPIs which deepen your insights and allow for more strategic decisions to be made.
Step 5 – Deploy
Once new requirements or fixes are identified, they need to be treated just like your initial project: deploy the changes and validate that they’re doing what you need them to do. This execution step may take a day or possibly a month but should be given the same level of dedication as you gave to getting your project off the ground. Don’t forget to validate, validate, validate!
You then find yourself within the governance cycle – validating and monitoring all that you’ve done, basking in the glory of your beautiful data and insightful reports, stretching and rehydrating after the marathon. To ‘govern’ is to control the way that something is done. Applying governance to your fully invested solutions ensures that you continue to get everything out of what you put everything into.
