I’ve been reflecting on past projects and where we have had challenges. The biggest challenges have been when project teams were solely focused on technology instead of the business value of their project.
Lewis Carroll said “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” For any successful journey, you need to know where you are going.
The converse of this quote is that if you don’t know where you want to end up, you’ll never be able to get there. This happens more often than we’d like to admit. We are good at “going”, at being busy. We need a constant reminder for our North Star – the thing that we are continuously driving to, our guiding principles. (Remember that project you were on where everyone WASN’T focused on the same North Star – and how painful that was?) Our guiding principle should be delivering business value.
I was on a project where my team built a document analysis tool for a client. The client wanted to analyze a set of documents and assign a rating score to the document set. A technical optimization would be apply the absolute best, most accurate, machine learning model to it. However the client’s problem was not just accuracy – they needed extreme transparency on how the risk score was derived. If we had focused only on technology, had shown up with a Neural Net, our solution would not have been used – it would not have delivered the value our client needed. We were able to succeed because we focused on business value for the client.
Business value should ideally be centered around a SMART goal that all key stakeholders agree on. This SMART goal is the North Star for your project – if you are progressing towards this goal, you are succeeding. If you don’t have this goal, you are just wandering down any road. Related to the SMART goal are metrics that achieve this goal. Don’t focus solely on technological metrics (accuracy, F1, etc) – think hard about what the business metrics are (efficiency, revenue, etc). and make sure you are measuring them. If your goal is efficiency, continually measure how long it takes to do X. Technological metrics can support business metrics but they are not the whole story, and by focusing on technology only you will not achieve business value.
Everyone on your project should be focused on the same driver(s) of business value, the same North Star. No matter your role on a project, you should know exactly how your work contributes to business value, and you should make sure your conversations and work on the project drive to that business value.
