Value Driven Data Science: Boost your impact. Earn what you’re worth. Rewrite your career algorithm.

[00:00:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Your Value Boost from Value Driven Data Science, the podcast that helps data scientists transform their technical expertise into tangible business value, career autonomy, and financial reward. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and I'm here again with Nicholas Kelly, author of Delivering Data Analytics and how to Interpret Data to turbocharge your data science career.
[00:00:27] In less time than it takes to run a simple query. In today's episode, you'll discover proven strategies to increase data dashboard and report adoption and showcase your value as a data professional. Welcome back, Nick.
[00:00:42] Nicholas Kelly: Pleasure to be back Dr. Hayes.
[00:00:44] Dr Genevieve Hayes: In our last episode we discussed your recently released book, how to Interpret Data, but you are also the author of another book Delivering Data Analytics, which is what I'd like to focus on today.
[00:00:56] Delivering data analytics. Has the subtitle, A step-by-step Guide to Driving Adoption of Business Intelligence From Planning to Launch. Nick, what's the number one reason dashboards and reports fail to get adopted in organizations despite all the work that goes into creating them.
[00:01:15] Nicholas Kelly: I'm gonna put it in one word value. They don't deliver value. That is the number one reason that they don't get adopted .
[00:01:23] Dr Genevieve Hayes: According to your ortho bio on the back of how to interpret data, you've designed and developed dashboards for some of the world's largest companies, from global banks to Formula One teams. I'm guessing that the dashboards and reports you deliver aren't the ones being ignored, which means they are the ones that are delivering value.
[00:01:44] What do you do differently from all the other data professionals out there so that your dashboards do deliver value?
[00:01:51] Nicholas Kelly: I probably started with delivering. A tremendous number of dashboards that didn't deliver value and got ignored, and it was greatly frustrating. I will also say what helped me tremendously was I did some work, well, a number of years of work as a director of user experience back in the day for software development.
[00:02:10] And it taught me a lot of things about, well, how do we make things. Interesting and valuable to users and users of course, being basically anyone who uses an interface. So when I looked at it from that perspective, there's a few things you can say about dashboards. They can either look appealing or not appealing.
[00:02:29] They need to look appealing even before we talk about is it delivering value to our organization. So our first barrier is to make it look appealing. That's not something you think you should be concerned about. So, I think the journey I took to deliver dashboards that was valuable was understanding the human element, the user experience, and then starting to understand the journey that you have to bring people on.
[00:02:53] You can't just put a dashboard in front of people. You have to bring them on a journey and. We've heard of the importance of data storytelling. For me, a more important story around data is the journey you bring people on. So the sort of wider data story. Are we bringing the people who we expect to use our dashboards on our journey?
[00:03:14] The biggest learning I had in all of this was. Not putting something, a completed dashboard, at least in my mind, a completed dashboard in front of an end user for the very first time. That's the first time they've heard of it. That is almost, not always, but almost guaranteed fail because if there's anything wrong with it.
[00:03:35] Are they compare it to their old reports, right? And it's like, oh, in my Excel, you know, that number's always different to what you have. Okay. Then you've lost them and it's gonna be really hard to get 'em back. So I've probably done more failed dashboards. In my career, then I would care to remember in order to get to a point where we could start delivering dashboards that actually are valuable to people.
[00:03:56] And it's really around that journey of bringing people on a journey.
[00:03:59] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So as the subtitle of the book suggests, it sounds like that journey starts right at the planning stage. Is that right?
[00:04:06] Nicholas Kelly: A hundred percent. If I was to break down the dashboard process into three very broad buckets, I would say the first one is requirements gathering. R. User experience and 'cause in the field of user experience, there's tremendous knowledge and processes and frameworks you can use from interviews, workshops, developing personas, you know all the good things that, if you talk to someone who's good at user experience, it's just like, that's totally normal.
[00:04:32] Like, why would you not do that? Are you insane? Yet, in the data world, we're building interfaces that are, in general, vastly more expensive than typical software user interface. The stakes are so much higher. We're making business decisions and strategic decisions off the data we're seeing in our dashboards.
[00:04:50] And so why wouldn't we borrow from the user experience world? So like that's one first bucket, and that's where you to what you're saying is like that would require. A lot of participation from the end consumers of the dashboard. So that's part one. Part two is, well,
[00:05:07] we've done the requirements, now we have to come up with what it's gonna look like. Let's agree. 'cause when I look back and diagnose at all the problems that I've had with dashboards in the past, it is people will complain about the look and feel. Oh, it's, my old report used to have a export to Excel button up here and it had this and 15 pie charts that we're rotating over here
[00:05:27] and all this stuff. Right or wrong, whether it's date of his best practice or not. If people have an expectation and you're not meeting it or at least addressing it, you've got another barrier. You have to deal with it. So the middle part of this journey is if I'm to put it into a finer point, wire framing.
[00:05:44] Wire frame with your intended audience and then I almost entirely skip over development 'cause it's assumed you're gonna develop the dashboard, you're gonna build it and you're gonna do a bang up job of doing a tremendous best practice dashboard. The third part is driving adoption.
[00:06:00] It gets its whole own chunk because it is probably the biggest gap in what we do right now with dashboards and reports is we should really upfront establish. What's our target adoption rate? So how many users do we have? How many do we expect to be using it on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
[00:06:18] Like what accounts for an active user? So they're basically the three things that's your process. You start right up front. You're engaging the user. You're talking to them, understanding their needs, their goals, what they want to get out of it. The second part is coming up with the vision for what it's gonna look like.
[00:06:36] Very practical. That's wire frame. What charts are we even gonna have in there what questions is it answering ? What goals is it driving towards? All of those good things. And then the final part is working with them is like this mini change management process where we're going to launch our dashboard, treat it like a product launch and make sure that we're tracking adoption appropriately.
[00:06:57] Dr Genevieve Hayes: What if one of our listeners has already developed a dashboard without taking your advice and has now heard this episode and wants to increase its adoption going forward, is there anything they can do at this point or do they have to just write off the dashboard? Board and start again.
[00:07:12] Nicholas Kelly: No, they're off to a great headstart. You already have something and you might have burned bridges on the way, so that could be a bad thing. But the flip side is you have something now whenever I'm talking about dashboards, in my head, I'm thinking product.
[00:07:24] It's a product, okay? You've got a dashboard. That's your first version of your product. You got something out there, you got feedback. You have to be open to the feedback because now you're gonna iterate on it and this whole process is iterative, so. It never ends. Your dashboard needs to evolve.
[00:07:41] So now you will go back to the start of the process and it'll talk to your end users and say, Hey, you've been using the dashboard for a couple of months. What do you like about, what do you not like about it? What would you like to change? What would you like to include in there? What's not needed? And now go wireframe that with them.
[00:07:56] And since you have a live dashboard, you might be able to just wire frame it, in the actual tool itself, you could mock it up and say, Hey, well what if it has this in there and does this and da, da, da, and then now drive adoption, and so to a degree it could be an accelerator for you, it could also be a problem.
[00:08:12] 'cause if people really dislike it. I would say it's rare that I would scrap something. I would just be probably overly communicative. And when I start the requirements process again, I'd say, okay, look, I heard all your feedback. I know you wanna change things. Here's the opportunity.
[00:08:27] Let's work together. Let's partner on this and go through this journey, and show them the whole plan. It's like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this, do this, wanna work with you. All right? And I'm open to feedback, right? And when people have that opportunity to partner, and if you can spin it in that way,
[00:08:42] so don't be a victim about it, it's like we're gonna partner on this together, then it's a joint failure and they're not gonna want it to be a failure. And this is the wonderful thing with this sort of process. It's like when you put out a dashboard at the end of this process and people say, oh, well, I don't like it because I wasn't involved in it.
[00:09:00] And it's like, oh, so you missed the five requirements gathering interviews. You mixed the, the workshop that I put on, you missed the brown bag. I was talking about the dashboard wire frames. You missed the meetings for the wire frames, da da da da. 15 touchpoint. Oh, sorry.
[00:09:12] That's on me. I mean, clearly not, right? So it becomes untenable for people to push back at that point, if you follow this type of process, and where you openly invite and engage with the end users, I.
[00:09:25] Dr Genevieve Hayes: our listeners could implement just one strategy tomorrow to increase adoption of their data products. What would you recommend?
[00:09:32] Nicholas Kelly: Or wire framing. That's the one thing I would say. Start that right away because it opens up so many doors for you. You can start talking to your end users and just sit down with them. Hey, what if we did this? What if we did that? The second thing I would say is talk to people. I. If you're not comfortable wire framing, just go have a conversation, do an interview, there's probably five or six questions that you could just ask them right off the bat, that would just make things completely different. So one of those two things, whichever people are comfortable with.
[00:10:03] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And from the way you're talking, it sounds like wire frames could just be pen and paper.
[00:10:08] Nicholas Kelly: Oh, a hundred percent. My preferred means is a whiteboard. And the way I used to go about it is just have sticky notes and before I have a chat with people, I would just have a couple of bar charts written up on a sticky notes. , some line charts, just a few things ready.
[00:10:22] And then when we start talking them, I'd say, Hey, can we have a chart up there talking about our sales, right? I just take the bar chart and say, let's not worry too much about the chart, but I'll just put say, what are our sales on top of that chart and stick it up there. So I'm not spending my time drawing the charts and we're not getting hung up on chart types 'cause we absolutely don't wanna do that.
[00:10:42] What we want to get on there is what questions in each chart are we basically answering?
[00:10:46] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And that's a wrap for today's value boost. But if you want more insights from Nick, you are in luck. We've got a longer episode with Nick, where you'll learn practical frameworks for transforming raw data into business impact through. The art of data interpretation, and it's packed with no nonsense advice for turning your data skills into serious clout, cash, and career freedom.
[00:11:10] You can find it now wherever you found this episode or at your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for joining me again, Nick,
[00:11:18] Nicholas Kelly: Thanks for having me, Dr. Hayes. It's a pleasure.
[00:11:20] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And for those in the audience, thanks for listening. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and this has been a value driven data science.