Hunter Douglas.

For those of us who haven’t joined a meeting with real insights instead of just reporting, let me help you understand what it can feel like. To do this, I need to take you back to 2008 and the midnight opening of Iron Man 2. This was around the time Robert Downy Jr. was quoted as saying something to the effect of everyone should know what it feels like to be a Beatle when asked about the reactions he’s gotten to the first Iron Man movie. The craze was real and my family and I were all in.

A week or so before the opening of Iron Man 2, we found the Iron Man helmet featured in the film at Wal-Mart. Zidane--my 8-year-old son--needed this helmet, and I had to get it for him. From day one, he wore that helmet everywhere we went. Out to eat, at the park, at the mall, it didn’t matter; he wore that helmet. And, of course, he wore the helmet for the midnight opening of Iron Man 2. It was just the two of us; we waited in line for what felt like an hour to buy the tickets and almost as long to get into the theater. The floors were sticky; it was loud, and teens everywhere were running around, full of energy. As we walk in, I can see the theater is packed. As my eyes start scanning around, looking for two seats together, my son comes around the corner enough for the people in the theater to see him, and they erupt in cheers shouting, “IRON MAN” and “TONY!” I don’t think words can recount the energy Zidane and I felt that night. My son was an actual celebrity in that theater. It’s a moment in our history that my son continues to retell to this day as he approaches his 21st birthday.

That is what it feels like to join a meeting with amazing insights! Now that you have an idea on how it feels, let's talk about how we transformed our reporting team here at Hunter Douglas into a true insights team. And maybe these steps will help you in your journey and give you your Beatles moment in your next meeting!

These are the best practices we established to get us there:

Hiring and Retaining the Right People

We needed to ensure the team members were ready and willing to shift from standard reporting to creating change. If our analysts were comfortable sending out reports but were not comfortable affecting change, we had to consider bringing on new members who enjoyed the change and clearly understood our customers. If you don’t get the people right, your insights will miss the mark. Understanding your internal customers is crucial to delivering relevant and valuable insights. This means learning about the customers' needs, priorities, and decision-making processes. Hiring team members with strong customer-facing skills, training existing team members who want to drive change, and demanding alignment with internal customers are all ways to ensure that the Insights & Analytics Team is delivering insights that meet their customers' needs. 

EliminatingBandwidth Constraints via Zero-Based Reporting

I received reports each day or week that I simply moved to a folder in case I needed the data for another time. But how often did I review to take action on the data? Realizing that these reports consume resources to complete each day, week, or month for the Analytics team, the right thing to do is to ensure the customer still needs the data rather than making it to the bottomless “just in case" folder. Zero-based reporting is a system to help do this. It ensures the reports that the team is spending time producing are making an impact and reduces the waste of unnecessary reporting. We set up a cadence and an end date for each report. Communicating with our customers to ensure that the data provided is valuable.

Setting Expectations and InspectingtheExpected

We established clear expectations for what we wanted to achieve, provided specific behavioral guidance, and inspected the results to ensure those expectations were met. In the context of an insights &analytics team, this meant sharing specific details that can easily be actioned and then setting expectations with the leadership team to deliver on these actions. Once we set these expectations, we continued reporting on the behavior and shared our progress. This ensured that our team delivered the data you provided. If the team is not hitting the mark, they can quickly shift the focus to the delivered insights.

Gaining Feedback and Buy-In from the Operations Team

Building actionable insights for the operations team is a critical component of this transformation, as it allows the insights &analytics team to impact the performance and efficiency of the business directly. To ensure that your insights are valuable to the organization, engage with stakeholders across different departments and gather their feedback regarding which insights will be most useful to them. This can help you to tailor your insights to specific needs and build trust and buy-in from key stakeholders.

The team needs a deep understanding of the operations team's goals and challenges and the ability to translate complex data into meaningful insights. Aligning to organizational goals helps focus and prioritize the recommendations and insights provided.  Prioritizing on the larger organizational goals will encourage the insights team to identify areas where data insights can improve business processes, optimize performance, or support strategic decision-making.

Upskilling Our Existing Team through Training with Automation in Mind

Automation can streamline the insights &analytics team's work and allow each analyst to focus on higher-level tasks, such as interpreting the data and developing recommendations. It also ensures that the work the team has been known for is enhanced by the new insights being discovered. We have focused on first automating the delivered reports, then having the analyst provide insights based on the newly automated reports. By investing in training and development opportunities, we have developed the team. This helps scale the team's efforts while streamlining processes that reduce the time and effort required to generate insights and reports.

In conclusion, back to Iron Man 2, due to the feedback my son received during the midnight showing where teenagers came up to him, shook his hand, asked him a ton of questions, he decided to wear this helmet for another whole year. Halloween, Christmas, and his birthday, he was Iron Man. Once you and your team deliver true insights, they’ll be hooked, just like Zidane was to his Iron Man helmet.