I’ve been reflecting on past projects and where we have had challenges.\u00a0 The biggest challenges have been when project teams were solely focused on technology instead of the business value of their project.<\/p>\n
Lewis Carroll said “If you don\u2019t know where you\u2019re going, any road will take you there.” For any successful journey, you need to know where you are going.
\nThe converse of this quote is that if you don\u2019t know where you want to end up, you\u2019ll never be able to get there. This happens more often than we\u2019d like to admit. We are good at \u201cgoing\u201d, at being busy. We need a constant reminder for our North Star \u2013 the thing that we are continuously driving to, our guiding principles. (Remember that project you were on where everyone WASN\u2019T focused on the same North Star – and how painful that was?)\u00a0 Our guiding principle should be delivering business value.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 A technical optimization would be apply the absolute best, most accurate, machine learning model to it. However the client\u2019s problem was not just accuracy \u2013 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 \u2013 it would not have delivered the value our client needed. We were able to succeed because we focused on business value for the client.<\/p>\n