I hate to be the bearer of bad news….but your data project is going to fail. Maybe not the one you’re working on today. Maybe not the one you’re starting next month. Heck, maybe not the one you don’t even know about yet…but at some point in the future – if you stay in the data world long enough – your data project is going to fail.
It should be common sense in the business world that if you don’t have a strategy and plan to execute that strategy in place, you are going to have a hard time. When I use the word ‘strategy’, I don’t just mean some over-arching plan that somebody has written up because they think ‘data is the new oil‘ and by ‘doing’ data projects they’ll somehow magically make the business bigger / better / richer / strong /etc. Data projects are just like any other project. Imagine you need to move your data center…you wouldn’t just start unplugging servers and loading them into your car to drive to the new data center, would you? Would you go and spend $20 million to hire a brand new sales team without building a thorough strategic plan for how that sales team will do what they need to do? You wouldn’t hire the people, on-board them and then say ‘start making phone calls’ without planning sales territories, building ‘go to market’ plans and building other tactical plans to outline how the team will execute on your strategy would you? Scratch that…I know some companies that have done that (and they failed miserably).
So we agree that if you don’t have a strategy, your data project is going to fail, right? Does that mean if you do the strategic planning process correctly, you’ll be swimming in the deep end of data success in the future? Maybe. Maybe not. The strategic plan isn’t everything. If you were successful because you planned well, then every company that ever hired McKinsey would be #1 in their industry with no hope of ever being surpassed by their competitors.
So…you think you have the best strategy, people, systems, process and culture, yes? You think you’ve done everything right and your data projects are set up for success. I hate to tell you, but your data project is going to fail. If you have the right strategy, people, systems, process and culture in place, you aren’t guaranteed success but you will be in a much better position to recover from that failure.
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