Predictive Analytics World: Workforce 2016

Thoughts on PAW Workforce 16

I had the opportunity earlier this month to attend Predictive Analytics World: Workforce and it was an incredible experience.  For those unfamiliar with the Predictive Analytics World (PAW) series, they are conferences which bring together data scientists, subject matter experts, and cross-industry vendors with a focus on predicting outcomes for business.  PAW Workforce is one of the subsets of the conference which is focused on predicting outcomes for the workforce.  

This is HR / Workforce / Talent / People Analytics at it's finest.  The attendees and talks represent the cutting edge of the practitioner science of studying people in the workplace. I'd argue that the way the conference looks at analytics fits Holger Mueller's most stringent definition of the term (one of the keynote speakers by the way).

I want to take some time to pass along my thoughts on the conference as a whole and describe the atmosphere and some of the presentations for anyone thinking about attending in 2017 (spoiler: I'd recommend you do).  I like to think I'm a fairly technical practitioner (still new to data science and focused on HR / business expertise) so that view might come through in my review, but there were sessions for everyone.  

In the sections below I'll cover Location, Networking, Vendors, Presentations, and "What I Missed".  I've also linked up all of the presenters and companies to their respective Linkedin and websites in case you want to learn more about the people and organizations I mention. 

Location

The gorgeous and vibrant San Francisco Bay Area.

Incredible analytics work is happening across the US and globally, but there’s some kind of magic (business density?) about the work in the bay area.  I feel the conference location made it an easy trip for a lot of incredible vendors and speakers as well, but more on that later.  I had the opportunity to come in the Friday before, spend a few days in San Francisco and Yosemite, and then attended the conference on Monday and Tuesday.

Networking

The caliber of the attendees and access to the speakers was absolutely a highlight and selling point for the conference.  I started the conference off by wandering into the incredible exhibition hall.  The exhibition hall was a central resource for not only PAW: Workforce, but all of the PAW conferences that were going on that week.  This brought together all of the vendors and practitioners from across the spectrum which made it a fascinating place to meet people. 

(Pictured R to L - Terradata, Visier (hidden), SignalHire and Chuck Norris).

The room was set up in a large semi-circle of vendors with a number of networking tables in the middle.  The atmosphere was collegial and there was plenty of space and time to explore the room. The first person I saw when I wandered into the conference room was Burke Powers.  

I have to give him a shout out and a thank you here since Burke is someone I've reached out to for career advice and one of the early people I spoke with about pursuing a career in HR analytics.  He was also one of the keynote speakers and is the current Sr. Director, People Data, Reporting, and Analytics at PayPal.  His candor, accessibility, and excitement to speak to everyone exemplified the tone of the conference.

Every conference attendee, vendor, speaker from all of the conferences was approachable, excited to chat, and had a fascinating story to tell. There's something exciting about interacting with a community that is in a boom time. In the past decade predictive work in HR has gone from the pipe-dream of a few to an in-demand skillset and the excitement and drive of the attendees at this conference seemed to hammer that home.

For an analytics practitioner in HR, an internal company network can sometimes be limited to the handful of people (or at times 1 person) who is also doing the type of work you're doing.  Data scientists don't necessarily scale, and as such for a lot of teams this seems to be the place to find their peer-group and a place to nerd out about the future of analytics in their function. It's a community I'm thankful to have met. 

Vendors

I almost didn't break Vendors out from networking because it was by far not a sales environment.   It's either that or I'm not important enough to sell to... but either way the vendors and teams at the booths were just as open, friendly, and accessible as the participants.  There was a focus on demos and talking about the science behind the work.

This attitude stood out the most in the presentations since some of them were given by the vendors.  Vendors knew that they were on the stage to talk about and share findings from the field as a whole and not to pitch their own services. As an attendee that was appreciated and showed a level of control around the conference.  As far as the vendors there in their official capacity, there were many highlights, but for the sake of space the two that stood out to me were Visier and DataRobot. 

Visier is a workforce intelligence solution.  To summarize, they have created and are applying a big data solution to provide workforce intelligence as a service. For a great review of their solution, take a look at this blog they put together: Fact or Hype: Do Predictive Workforce Analytics Actually Work?

(Screenshot from the Visier tool looking at antecedents of turnover)

The Visier booth, demo, and staff working it were great, but the biggest takeaway that stood out to me was having Anton Smessaert in attendance at the conference.  Anton is the lead data scientist at Visier and was frankly a fantastic attendee.  Being able to ask him questions over lunch about their vision for the product and having him in sessions asking questions of the presenters added to the conference.  It impressed upon me again that the conference was not just a sales show for the vendors or a hype machine, but a core technical conference that attracted leading data science participants.

Data Robot was not a dedicated human resources vendor, but a PAW vendor in general which was one of the reasons I wanted to highlight it. The draw of PAW is much bigger than just the human resource related analysis which brings in some big players working in analytics in the rest of the industry. I'm a huge fan of getting HR to steal everything they can from the rest of the industry and speaking with Data Robot was fascinating.  

Talking with the Data Robot team, they came across excited about the future of the data science profession (and rightfully so).  As seen in the Venn diagram above, their software solution seeks to automate as much of the math & stats and programming skills as they can.  To the HR professionals who are feeling some trepidation about the rise of data science in HR, this should be music to your ears that some vendors are looking to ease you into the scene.  Seeing solutions like this on the very cutting edge was illuminating towards the future of the profession. 

Talent Analytics, Signal Hire, and all of the other wonderful vendors- Sorry to have run out of room!  To the readers, I haven't been able to find a vendor list that detailed everyone who was there, but if I find one I'll post in the comments.

Presentations

Before diving into these, here's the link to the full agenda so you can see who spoke at the conference.

When I saw the agenda I was thrilled, but then I realized I had to pick between some of the sessions. Every speaker and sessions sounded fantastic and it was a painful decision to chose one over the other. I was helping out as a moderator over the two days of the conference, so for day one I was in the Technical Track room and for day two I was in the Business Track.  I'm tempted to run through them all, but I'm going to highlight a few below that left a strong impression.

Opening Keynote - Your Place in the Future of Workforce analytics

Not enough can be said to thank Greta for putting this conference together with Rising Media and driving it to new heights. Greta Roberts is the CEO of Talent Analytics and one of the founders of PAW Workforce. As chair of the conference she kicked off the day with an insightful look at the current and future state of analytics in the HR space.

One of the big takeaways here was her work and thoughts on unpacking engagement as a measure for the workforce.  Her talk covered a multitude of topics, but for more information on the engagement piece take a look at her recent post on the Talent Analytics blog.

Open Sourced Workforce Analytics: An Overview of 3 Algorithms for Common Predictive Modeling Situations

One of the more technical presentations came from Jason Noriega (pictured above) and Nery Castillo-McIntyre.  Among other accomplishments, the duo recently won the "Employee Attrition Prediction Challenge" on CrowdANALYTIX.  During their presentation they walked through their go-to techniques and analytical tools; even analyzing a dataset from the Titanic live for the crowd.  It was easily one of the most accessible, but still highly technical presentations I've seen and the credit goes to the top-notch presenters.  One of the big takeaways for me was their recommendation of "Rattle" an open source graphic user interface for R. I've been using it since then and second their recommendation completely. 

Find out more about Rattle here / Info on learning R

Breaking the Curve: Using Predictive Analytics to Boost Call Center Retention 

The T-mobile team of Jim Blackwell, a director of HR, and Megan Brown, Workforce Insights Lead, closed the presentations on day 1 of the conference. Jim and Megan co-presented, with Megan tackling the technical pieces and explaining the data science and Jim providing the SME perspective and reviewing the institutional challenges.  The two of them had a fantastic presentation on analyzing call center retention.

Two big takeaways for me.  First off, partnerships like this are hard to develop in an organization and getting to results that matter is even more rare.  T-Mobile is doing something right with the uncarrier redesign being applied internally. They spoke openly and candidly about barriers they encountered and how they surmounted them.  

The second big takeaway was the prevalence of survival analysis in this presentation and others throughout the weekend.  For those unfamiliar with it, survival analysis is a statistical technique similar to regression that takes into account changes in behavior over time.  In my opinion it's easily one of the best methods to track, compare, and report on attrition.

Unfortunately the barrier to entry (understanding of statistics and statistical software) is higher than what most HR professionals are comfortable with.  It was fantastic to see it used in this presentation as well as a number of others though to explain and analyze trends and it gave me hope that we're going to see this more often. 

The panels: "Real-World Experience from Large Predictive Projects" and "Politics, Power Tools and Perfect Data"

The two panels that wrapped day two just blew me away.  The first was a panel with Haig Nalbantian of Mercer and Chantrelle Nielsen from Microsoft (formerly of Volometrix)  moderated by Burke Powers.  The three of them tackled everything related to large-scale workforce analytics from institutional challenges to education within a large organization. 

The second panel moderated by Pasha Roberts was a high level view of trends across the industry as a whole.  It included a power team of Megan Brown, Vishwa Kolla, Jon Frampton and Burke Powers.  There's no way I could do their content justice in a quick blog post, but the big takeaway for me was that these were panel of experts, moderator by experts, speaking to a room that largely  "gets it".  They were able to dive into substantial content right off the bat.  

A lot of the time when these experts write articles or speak at general HR or outside conferences there's a need to fill in a lot of the story first.  Many people outside the space don't realize yet why they should be interested in HR and many people inside the HR community are still getting up to speed on why they should analyze people data.  To hear these panelists speak within an environment where that understanding was the floor for entry was refreshing. They were able to dive into deeper issues immediately and I think that was true of the conference as a whole. 

What I Missed

Too much!!  I could have spent a week at the conference and still would have missed content.  I missed two entire sections of speakers by virtue of not being able to be in two places at once.  Missed Pasha Roberts', Ben Waber's, and Jon Frampton's talks to name a few that I would have loved to see, but I luckily was able to catch up with them networking.  I'd recommend you come to PAW Workforce with a teammate to take it all in.

The side-conference day long workshops were what I felt I missed the most. I'm currently wrapping up my MBA, so I couldn't pull together the funds or time to make it to these, but on the Sunday before and the Wednesday / Thursday after the conference there are master-class workshops taught by practitioners that looked absolutely incredible.  

To throw out two examples, there was an opportunity to learn R with Max Kuhn, Director of Nonclinical Statistics at Pfizer Global R&D or attend a session on Uplift Modeling with Kim Larsen, director of client algorithms at stitch fix. (Sidenote: Uplift modeling is the next algorithm HR needs to steal from marketing. Want to find out if your retention packages are working? Uplift modeling is how you do it).  I feel I got as much out of the conference as I could over two days, but that there is still more to pick up and that's driving me to attend again next year.  

Where to go to learn more?

1. See Derek McIver's excellent reflections on the conference
2. See Andy Gray's reflections on the PAW Business conference (not PAW Workforce)
3. Follow @PAWWorkforce on Twitter
4. Like the PAW Workforce page on FB
5. Check out the storify recap of PAW Workforce 2016 
6. Follow the predictive analytics times news feed

Lastly, a huge thank you to Rising Media, Inc, conference chair Greta Roberts, and all of the speakers for putting on an incredible event.  I hope to see you all there in 2017. 

- Richard Rosenow

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Let me know if you have any questions about the conference below.  As always I'd love to connect on Twitter or Linkedin.  

• https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/richardrosenow
• https://www.twitter.com/RichardRosenow

 Other articles I've published on Linkedin:

• HR Analytics Starter Kit Part 1 - Intro to HR analytics
• HR Analytics Starter Kit - Part 2 - Intro to R programming
• HR Analytics Starter Kit - Part 3 - Podcasts
• HR has Last Mover Advantage in HR Analytics
• In Defense of Middle Measures: The Use of Constructs in HR Analytics