BUSINESS ENGAGEMENT pROCESS
Step 1 - Partnership to Understand IT Problem Space
This step involves partnering with business and tech teams to understand the IT problem space and the quantitative skills of the participants. We then partner to identify relevant data sources, which may already exist or need to be created. Examples include web usage data, IT security related data, etc. This preparatory work, which includes agreeing on processes to securely share data and results, then feeds into the next two sections below. (Note that such engagements need to be explicitly defined so may require one or more planning meetings to establish scope and direction of the desired work.)
Step 2 - Data Cleaning & Statistical Analysis
The next step is focused on generating reliable results, which requires analyzing good quality data. This means that substantial effort is typically spent cleaning and merging various data sets. (Note that data quality validation may require one or more follow-up meetings with the business and/or tech teams.)
Step 3 - Establishing Business Context
This final step involves working with the business and tech teams to summarize the analysis results for presentation to leaders to support informed decision making. Note that the effort to understand the background and objectives of the business and tech teams is typically interwoven into the previous steps, which helps to streamline this phase of the engagement.