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Applying Agile Methodologies to Business Analytics
04 de October de 2022
It’s important to make good decisions, but it’s also important to make them quickly. Data analytics has forever changed the way we face decision making based on all the variables at our disposal.
Business analytics has experienced a great leap in just a few years. Just recently, metric analytics revolted around a very limited amount of data, which made it much more complicated to arrive at conclusions than it is nowadays.
Currently, it’s possible to collect a great amount of data, making it easier to simulate different scenarios applying different strategies and watching where each possibility would take us in the future.
While it’s true that new technologies allow us to take on larger amounts of data and speed up our decision making processes, we must be careful and know how to correctly analyse data in order to gain the most benefits. That’s why Agile has entered the scene in Business Analytics.
1. What Are Agile Methodologies?
Agile methodologies were born with the dawn of the century thanks to the Agile Manifesto, created by 17 United States thinkers. This corpus of values and principles puts individuals and their interactions above processes and tools.
These methodologies abandon the traditional cascade system, hierarchical and stagnant, to favour collaborative and interactive processes that allow for the refinement and improvement of propositions, designs and implementations, all developed in teams.
Agile was created to optimise the response capacity when faced with changes and contingencies. Its greatest assets are collaboration, flexibility, transparency, adaptation and constant communication. These methodologies become tangible in techniques such as Scrum, KanBan or Lean.
2. Advantages of Implementing Agile Methodologies
Data itself isn’t important. It’s what you do with it that matters. Having all the data but no team to adapt it to the necessities of the company is like giving a Formula 1 car to a regular driver. Agile methodologies help improve response, decisions and data-related processes.
Flexibility is its great contribution. Having all those digital tools won’t be any good if teams are not flexible. Agile methodologies let you integrate analytics to every process and open the game to different participants.
Time is money so, implementing these methodologies to a market of data analytics is a must. You have to be the quickest, but also the best; and you must know how the market evolves.
The key to implementing Agile to Business Analytics is to lower the hierarchies and to reduce the loss of time that comes with bureaucratic movements.
These methodologies bring quality and speed to the data we want to collect in order to analyse a product or service, giving us a greater global vision than our competition. Every process has been carried out more quickly and safely, protecting our project.
3. Some Advice for Applying Agile Methodologies in Business Analytics
Be Careful with Your Expectations: You must understand how and why it’s done. You must realise that it all calls for sacrifice in every area and it needs the commitment of every team.
Leaders Must Delegate: A change of model that includes giving up on a hierarchical model is all about trusting your teams and your ability to delegate.
Transparency Prevails: Access to information on different levels is one of the keys; even more so in Business Analytics. In order for everyone to get involved and make decisions at all the different levels, everyone must be able to access that information in a trustworthy and transparent way.
Flexibility Above Everything: It’s one of the Agile trademarks. Flexibility, agility, quick response, communication, constant communication.
Don’t Be Dogmatic: The framework that these methodologies provide are very beneficial when they are well implemented. But you shouldn’t keep on trying to use them if it’s bad for your decision making processes. At times, the best solution is to take the methodologies to your own ground and adapt them to your own needs.
Agile methodologies help you deal with uncertainty, change and the need to adapt. They offer beneficial dynamics for data analysis that result in better decision making.
Article written in collaboration with David Uribe, Director of Technology and Transformation at Oracle and Agustín Valera, independent Agile Consultor.