Delivering Quick Wins: Score Early and Often — Part II

In Part I of this two-part arti­cle, I intro­duced how most com­pa­nies have rapid time-to-value expec­ta­tions for their web ana­lyt­ics invest­ments. Senior exec­u­tives won­der how quickly insights from web data can be con­verted into valu­able enhance­ments to their online busi­ness. Quick wins are designed to sat­isfy this need as they pin­point spe­cific data-driven actions that gen­er­ate a pos­i­tive return for an online busi­ness. String­ing together sev­eral quick wins builds momen­tum for a web ana­lyt­ics team, and each new quick win becomes another suc­cess story that fur­ther rein­forces the impor­tance of devel­op­ing a truly data-driven culture.

Con­tin­u­ing my hockey theme from the pre­vi­ous arti­cle (can you tell I’m from Canada?), the famous Mon­treal Cana­di­ens goalie, Jacques Plante, once said, “How would you like a job where every time you make a mis­take a big red light goes on and 18,000 peo­ple boo?” If I’m focused purely on report­ing as a web ana­lyst, I’m going to feel much like a goal­tender. I’m going to be react­ing to the var­i­ous report­ing requests fired my way and hop­ing not to miss an impor­tant save. I’d rather be a for­ward at the other end of the rink scor­ing goals (quick wins) and get­ting cheers out of 18,000 peo­ple at my company.

In this part of the arti­cle, I’d like to dis­cuss the rela­tion­ship between quick wins and the imple­men­ta­tion process. I’d also like to explore what to do if your team has focused pri­mar­ily on report­ing and not on deliv­er­ing quick wins to your orga­ni­za­tion. Is it too late? Not if you’re deter­mined to stage a data-driven come­back. He shoots, he scores!

Quick wins and the imple­men­ta­tion process

As a web ana­lyt­ics team, it is impor­tant to cap­i­tal­ize on the ini­tial inter­est in the new web ana­lyt­ics tools. There is a lim­ited win­dow of oppor­tu­nity in which you can deliver a quick win to con­tinue the same level of enthu­si­asm or build upon it. How­ever, exec­u­tives and other key stake­hold­ers need to clearly under­stand when the game starts — “Game on! Our imple­men­ta­tion is com­plete”. The web ana­lyt­ics team will need to man­age expec­ta­tions through­out the entire imple­men­ta­tion phase. You’ll have a prob­lem if the com­pany expects goals before the play­ers are even dressed and on the ice. You don’t want to be down 0–2 before you’ve even started the game so man­ag­ing expec­ta­tions is critical.

Along with man­ag­ing expec­ta­tions, you want to be care­ful with rush­ing your imple­men­ta­tion in order to achieve an imme­di­ate win. Your imple­men­ta­tion forms the back­bone or foun­da­tion for not just the first quick win but all ongo­ing value that can be achieved with your Omni­ture tools (with­out re-implementing). Short­sight­ed­ness and incom­plete­ness at this key stage could pre­vent your orga­ni­za­tion from obtain­ing full value from its web ana­lyt­ics invest­ment. Most large com­pa­nies need to approach their imple­men­ta­tions in pri­or­i­tized phases. When your imple­men­ta­tion is done in phases, there should be ample quick win mate­r­ial front-loaded in the first phase or you may run into time-to-value con­cerns from senior man­age­ment before you even reach sub­se­quent phases.

Stage a come­back with quick wins

Well, your imple­men­ta­tion may have been com­pleted some time ago. Your team has been able to get some good report­ing in place, but you now real­ize quick wins haven’t been a key part of your game plan. The per­ceived “0−2″ score may not reflect all of the hard work that has gone into gath­er­ing busi­ness require­ments and in estab­lish­ing proper tag­ging and report­ing. How­ever, it does reflect the rest­less­ness in senior man­age­ment and the rest of the com­pany around lag­ging time to value.

Recently, the Chicago Black­hawks tied the record for the biggest come­back in NHL his­tory when they over­came a five-goal deficit to beat the Cal­gary Flames 6–5 in over­time. Call a time out. Rally the team around iden­ti­fy­ing a sim­ple but mean­ing­ful quick win. You need to focus on a quick win for an inter­nal group that is will­ing and able to exe­cute on rec­om­men­da­tions in a timely man­ner. As you start to have some suc­cess and gain cred­i­bil­ity, you can slowly increase the size, scope, or com­plex­ity of each new quick win.

In Omni­ture Con­sult­ing, we reg­u­larly help clients with iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial quick wins. Some­times it’s help­ful to aug­ment your team’s exper­tise in a par­tic­u­lar area or receive extra help when your team’s band­width becomes stretched. Some com­pa­nies are will­ing to admit they don’t know what they don’t know, and a fresh, third-party per­spec­tive can often be valu­able in find­ing new quick win oppor­tu­ni­ties. Whether you rally the inter­nal team or turn to the Omni­ture Con­sult­ing bench for addi­tional help, the key thing to remem­ber is that momen­tum begins with the first quick win. Focus on get­ting that first goal to stage a data-driven comeback.

In my next arti­cle in this data-driven series, I will cover the impor­tance of test­ing and val­i­dat­ing your imple­men­ta­tion efforts.