How to improve the productivity of your resources and maximize the impact of your investments in Visual Analytics

The interactive visualization tools have gained good ground in the BI and Analytics space thereby leading to a good demand for the professionals. Coupled with the ease of learning the skill, this has attracted a lot of people. However, relying solely on the Visualization tool/s skill set will only take the professionals so far.

As a BI Analytics Leader, you need to further take additional steps to facilitate right environment to extract success from your program. These projects work better with the agile framework and can be refined with agreed iterations with the business stakeholders. Therefore the way the team is structured and the skill of its components has significant bearing on the quality of the delivery as well as the overall engagement experience for your customers whether internal or external.

From my interactions over various project deliveries, i therefore offer these suggestions to ensure that the internal or external resources assigned to such projects have fairly well-rounded capability to help you attain success in your overall program. It's quite challenging to find resources with skills across these areas and therefore might call for investments in their upskilling. Over the long term it leads these investments will lead to improved effectiveness of the project outcomes and reduction in overall cost.

For Techies, cross skills across these aspects increase their efficacy:

• Excellent grasp on the viz tool (s) and the best practices. This should also encompass the effective communication aspects related to the visualization practice.
• Good SQL skills to handle variety of sources.
• Good fundamentals on the dimensional modelling, data warehousing concepts. Coupled with point 2, this puts you in driver position to offer suggestions on the modelling (overall solution design) and increases your value from client’s perspective. Also, might help you generate new use cases or take better decisions to shift some of the loads to the back end, thereby improving consumer experience.
• Ability to understand the business scenarios and how data/viz is relevant for enabling analysis and decisions. Try and understand the core business various like PTP, OTC, RTR etc and the associated KPI’s. (High learning effort but produces the most value) This will also help you understand whether your dashboard/visualization is communicating well from the consumer perspective.

For the Business analysts or power business users:

Getting a decent grasp on one of the Visualization and analytics tools will help open up opportunities as well as generate interest of your stakeholders. And the effort investment to reach that level is relatively low. BA's can initiate by getting the data in flat files and work the visual analytics. If the outcome hits home, IT can be engaged to regularize the dashboards and integrate/automate data flows.

You should also look at investment in any of the new generation self service data preparation tools will help reduce this learning curve and also improves the productivity of your resources. I have found these tools to be very effective in enhancing the speed of delivery. Their selection depends on your existing product portfolio and the missing capabilities that you want to address. Both your technical as well as business analysts will benefit from such self-service data preparation tools as they facilitate transformations with ease.