Case Study:
Embracing Agile Analytics

We’re not able to share the name of this customer, but our work with them has been so transformative we really wanted to share their story, albeit anonymously…

This customer is a leading European utility provider. Its analytics teams work across a wide range of functions, supporting the business in areas including customer solutions, projects and engineering, trading and enterprise services. 

When we first started working with the customer the organisation was going through a massive organisational change which included a lot of change within individual analytics teams. New teams were forming, and the analytics function was moving towards a “hub and spoke” model. There was no standard approach to analytics projects and the analytics teams had no way to track the value and outcome of the work they were delivering to the business.

Our first conversation with their Data Science Manager was about how we could help the team run better projects, but the actual requirement went much deeper than that. The teams were going through change themselves, as well as wanting to be able to support the wider change taking place within the business. They wanted to become a better analytics team, one that was able to work more effectively with the business, keeping their customer at the heart of everything they did, and needed some help getting started with this transformation. Specifically, they wanted to create a process that worked for them, that facilitated the right conversations with the business, and which would support the team on its objective to become a best-in-class analytics team.

The Krisolis team started where we always start, making sure we understood all the desired outcomes. We then crafted a bespoke workshop that blended an introduction to our Agile Analytics Framework along with elements of Approaches to Problem Solving and an Introduction to 6 Hat Thinking. The workshop challenged attendees to think about how they wanted to work together and facilitated the creation of a working process that worked for them.

“There’s not many companies that will look at what we need rather than just say “this is what we do”, that will work hard to see what our bespoke needs and requirements are and work from that.” Customer Data Science Manager.

This initial workshop was followed up with a tailored course designed to unify the teams’ approaches to Storytelling with Data that brought together elements of the business analytics methods that analysts need to move beyond basic reporting and the visualisation methods to present that analysis back to the business in a meaningful way.

“Working with Krisolis has been absolutely transformative to the analytics team. It has helped us put our business customer at the centre of what we do as a team, focusing on what their needs actually are as opposed to what we assume they are.”

Since the initial workshop, the Agile Analytics Framework is now being used across all business facing analytics teams in all business units. “It’s improving how we deliver to the business in a timely manner. We’re able to focus on and adapt to changing requirements more quickly than before.” And, importantly “the team really like working this way, they’re more hands on and more a part of the business”.

Key benefits that the training has driven include – 

  • Quicker project turn arounds – Using the Agile Analytics Framework has allowed the team to turn out more MVP, more quickly.
  • Better relationships with the business – Using the MVP approach means the team can deliver working models and dashboards from day one, which can then be added to and improved hand in hand with the business.
  • The ability to bring the customer on the journey – With the customer at the centre of their work, rather than just present end results the teams now also focus on how they got to deliver the results has generated really positive feedback from the business. “Previously we would have gone in with the hard and heavy science, now we go in with the story, and the journey”.
  • Impacting Data Literacy across the organisation – Explaining their work in ways that their customers can understand has increased buy-in from the business, as well as educated their wider audience on what is possible.
  • Improved data – bringing the customer along on projects means it’s easy to feedback issues within source systems that the business can easily fix.
  • A 100% increase on capturing the value of the projects the team works on, allowing them to clearly demonstrate the value they deliver the business. 
  • An uptake across the business units of self-service offerings such as dashboards.
  • Increased the visibility of the Analytics Teams – feeding into the wider customer strategy they’ve created a customer focused dashboard that went through an iterative development process with the business and is now used by the business monthly. 

When asked whether she’d recommend Krisolis, the Data Science Manager said “Absolutely! Particularly for the experience and knowledge you have and your ability to adapt to our needs. Not many places will do that”.

“Working with Krisolis has been absolutely transformative to the analytics team. It has helped us put our business customer at the centre of what we do as a team, focusing on what their needs actually are as opposed to what we assume they are.” 

Customer Data Science Manager.