How to Run a Successful People Analytics Project
All People Analytics projects should aim to support the business make better decisions and ultimately drive real business value. The challenge, then, for many People Analytics teams is to keep up with the pace of the business and changing business priorities.
Without truly getting to the heart of the business problem and prioritising the projects that will drive the most change, people analytics teams regularly set themselves up for failure. As David Green outlines in “Five Steps to getting Started with People Analytics”
“Ensure you understand the business and the challenges that they’re facing. What are the challenges keeping your CEO and board awake at night? Think sales productivity, product quality, customer retention and risk. This is where the company makes money and what determines its ultimate success – all have a significant people element to them.”
It’s imperative that any people analytics project you embark on within your organisation adds business value and drives actionable outcomes, but the key is ensuring that the right insights are being acted on.
As Piyush Mathur, Global Head of People Analytics at Johnson and Johnson shares during his conversation with David Green on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, ‘analytics without insight is just over ahead’. He explains:
“When I came up with this, insight without outcome is overhead, it was really thinking through that many times as people analytics we come up with insights, we hand it over to our stakeholders and we walk away.
We just expect them to take actions and we did not really know what happened with those actions. Right? So, if we are providing those insights, either the actions are not happening or actions are happening with no real outcomes, then all of this was a waste.”
In this short video taken from “An Introduction to People Analytics”, I share the Eight Step Model of Purposeful People Analytics. It outlines the eight critical steps required in driving real success with your People Analytics projects, ensuring you always start with the business problem.
The Eight Step Model for Purposeful Analytics
Step #1 - Frame Business Questions
In essence, know why you are undertaking the specific analytics exercise. Or, in other words: "What is the business reason?" This step must come first to avoid undertaking the wrong analysis and also to give the project the best chance of success. A clearly framed and well-defined business question ensures that the analytics work is actually necessary.
Step #2 - Build Hypotheses
Building and clarifying a hypothesis is important for “testing” beliefs about the causes of business issues. Strong hypotheses should guide the data gathering and analysis phases in a way that links to business questions. Formulating hypotheses in advance helps guard against reaching conclusions based on observed relationships in your data that result from chance instead of genuine underlying relationships.
Step #3 - Gather Data
The data gathering step requires identifying the most relevant data for testing the hypotheses and determining whether data quality is sufficient to proceed. Decisions need to be made about whether to gather existing data, collect new data, or do both.
Please note that this step is Step 3 -- NOT Step 1. Too often we found that people wanted to start their workforce analytics with gathering data and analysing it without first asking 'why'. This wonderful quote from Josh Bersin, perfectly illustrates why you should always start with 'why':
"After a recent speech, an attendee came up to me and said, ‘I can predict attrition for my firm to 92 percent accuracy.’ I said, ‘Wow! That’s great. Is attrition a problem for your firm?’ And she said, ‘No, not really.’"
The Eight Step Model for Purposeful Analytics from The Power of People (Pearson 2017)
Step #4 - Conduct Analyses
This is where the methodology and statistics are applied to data to test the hypotheses and provide the basis for insights. Without this step, the fundamental building blocks of any analytics project simply do not exist; without performing analysis, patterns in data will never be discovered.
Step #5 - Reveal Insights
Workforce analysts must uncover insights for two main reasons. First, analysts cannot assume that project sponsors and stakeholders are able to derive the most pertinent insights themselves. The second reason is more subtle: If analysts present only data and analysis without insights, executives and project sponsors might draw their own conclusions to best fit their preconceptions.
Step #6 - Determine Recommendations
Analytics projects are all about helping the business improve its performance, so although insights are interesting, only recommendations will help improve the business. Recommendations are what business leaders and, in this case, project sponsors need. A well-articulated recommendation makes a great impetus for change. Some analytics projects fail at this stage simply because recommendations are not expressed clearly.
Step #7 - Get Your Point Across
All analytics projects have a moment of truth. This often happens as you communicate the outcomes of the project to the sponsor or other stakeholders, to get your point across. This is the moment when you are able to inform decision making. Experienced practitioners and leaders use storytelling and carefully consider their visualisations to create the desired impact for their message.
Step #8 - Implement And Evaluate
The implementation and evaluation step has three discrete aims. First, it ensures that decisions are made as a result of your project. Second, it formulates actions for implementation based on those decisions. Finally, it facilitates evaluating the project against whether it returned value to the organisation.
The Eight Step Model for Purposeful Analytics has been developed to help workforce analytics practitioners, HR professionals and leaders be successful in their endeavours. With the research we undertook, we have found that projects are most successful when all eight steps are taken in this sequence. If you’re interested in learning more about the Eight Step Model for Purposeful Analytics and how to build the skills you need to drive real success with your People Analytics projects, the result in actionable outcomes then take a look our learning pathway “Running a Successful People Analytics Project” in the myHRfuture Academy.
Please note that The Eight Step Model for Purposeful Analytics is a copyright of the authors of the book, The Power of People: Nigel Guenole, Jonathan Ferrar and Sheri Feinzig
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Ferrar is the CEO and co-founder of Insight222. He is a globally respected speaker, author and business adviser in HR strategy, workforce analytics, and the future of work. Jonathan has worked in corporate business for 25+ years for companies like Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Lloyds Bank, and IBM where he served as executive manager for 10+ years. He is a keynote speaker, co-author of The Power of People, and Board Member of the CIPD.
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