Day 4: Plan Tactics and Success Metrics

This is ​2024 Data Team Planning week​. Read ​Day 1​, ​Day 2​, and ​Day 3​.

Most of us start our planning here. With tactics. Action steps. Battle plans.

And that's why most goals and plans fail. They have sky-high ambition, but limited foundation to support them. The time you spend going over the last 3 days is the foundation you need to build tactical plans with longevity throughout 2024.

Today is about taking your goals and getting them on the ground. Specifically, we need to establish Tactics to achieve the goals and Success Metrics to know if we are getting closer.

Get your list of goals from yesterday and write Tactics and Success Metrics for each.

Tactics:

Design 2-3 thoughtful activities for each goal that have a high probability to help you achieve that goal. Tactics are action-focused.

Success Metrics

What other things would be true if you accomplished the goal? Take some time to imagine the surrounding impact that hitting your goal would cause. Sometimes if the goal is difficult to measure by itself, there are several supporting areas that you can more easily measure to track your progress.

Example:

Goal: In order to move from slow and delayed deployment of stakeholder requests to a first-class data platform we will decrease our new data request delivery time period by 25%.

Tactics:

• Analyze bottlenecks in the development process.

• Implement automated testing for Data models.

Success Metrics:

• The Data Team can identify multiple areas for improvement in development and delivery.

• Stakeholders report higher levels of satisfaction with data team responsiveness via quarterly surveys.

This work might take some time to do well. Pull in senior members of your team to develop your tactics and success metrics. Run them by peers or other members of your team to see if the tactics and success metrics align with your stated goals.

And if you ever need help,

I’m here,

Sawyer

from ​The Data Shop