Make Data-Driven Decisions
A Guide to Business Visibility
Surrounded by Data, But Unable to See the Path Forward
Data surrounds us, competing for space on our drives and in our lives. Worldwide, nearly 402.74 million terabytes of data are created every single day.
Yet despite all the data available, businesses still feel they are making decisions in the dark. Stakeholders look at a sea of numbers and see only chaos. Teams wade through conflicting information and find only noise. Executives sit through carefully crafted slide shows and feel only frustration. What they need are answers. All they see are more questions.
It doesn't have to be that way. Achieving cost transparency and clarity across the enterprise is possible. To get there, we need to first dive deeper into the obstacles blocking our view.
Strategy Data Is Disconnected From Execution Data
Organizations spend millions on strategies to propel businesses forward, and millions more on teams to deliver on that strategy. But there's a chasm between day-to-day execution and strategy that can feel impossible to bridge.
To close that gap, businesses must find ways to weave near-real-time data through every process, tool, and business decision. Yet KPMG found that only 12% of companies have an approach to data taxonomy and analytics that is embedded throughout the enterprise, and only 21% say it's a fundamental part of the business strategy.
In the absence of data they can trust, organizations end up making gut-level guesses instead of data-driven decisions about which projects to prioritize and where to add capacity.
Data Is Scattered and
Inconsistent from Team to Team
Today's businesses are spoiled for choice when it comes to technology. Whether they need help tracking their work, communicating with one another, or understanding their customers, they have multiple tools that can serve their needs.
Too often, this leads to tool sprawl–too many tools on too many platforms–making it difficult to move data from one to another. Plus, even inside the same tool suite, subtle changes in setup and execution from one business unit to the next impact data taxonomy.
As a result, organizations spend countless hours manipulating data into spreadsheets and slide decks that are stale by the time they're even completed, leaving teams and executives hesitant and unsure about the insights. Maybe that's why a mere 6% of organizations report that they can locate meaningful insights throughout the enterprise.
Data is Misleading Without Context & Conversations
Perhaps most dangerous of all is when a team believes they have all the data they need and moves ahead with a decision, only to find out too late they were missing the right context.
Accurate insights rely on both qualitative and quantitative data, yet reconciling qualitative and quantitative data can be difficult. One reason might be that teams often hesitate to share bad news as quickly as they share good news.
Fearing they lack a complete picture, organizations tend to overcompensate by scheduling countless hours of meetings. These hours add up fast! One company discovered they had spent 300,000 hours in weekly meetings in a single year.
The end result is that businesses are stuck, circling endlessly, unable to garner enough trust and alignment to make a confident decision.
To Step Forward with Confidence, Businesses Need End-to-End Enterprise Visibility.
Shatter Uncertainty with the 3 C's of Enterprise Visibility
Connect
Start by connecting execution to strategy with technology and tools including Jira Align, Atlas, OKRs for Jira, Advanced Planning, Structure, and Big Picture. Leadership and teams will gain clear insights into how to adjust funding, prioritize projects, and allocate resources to drive business forward.
- Link execution to strategy using Jira Align
- Integrate Atlas and OKRs for Jira
- Use Advanced Planning for prioritization
- Gain insights into Structure and Big Picture
Consolidate
Once you have a clear connection in place, you can consolidate optimized data from disparate tools into a single-pane-of-glass dashboard, with connectors like AlphaServe, datasets like Enterprise Insights, and data visualization tools like Power BI, Tableau, and Atlassian Analytics.
- Consolidate data into real-time dashboard
- Integrate tools with connectors
- Utilize datasets like Enterprise Insights
- Visualize data with Power BI, Tableau
Collaborate
Once data is connected and consolidated, don't forget to collaborate. Data is only numbers on a page without human guardrails to help provide understanding, insights, and context. Data-prompted conversations give you the full picture, so you can gain alignment and make decisions with authority.
- Collaborate to add context to data
- Use human insights to guide decisions
- Facilitate data-driven conversations
- Align teams for decision-making
Connect to Optimize Data Decisions
Start by connecting what teams are doing with the strategy set by leadership.
According to a survey by McKinsey, enhanced visibility between teams and leadership is proven to improve operational effectiveness by 30-50%.
- Teams have better insight into task expectations when strategies are expressed in OKRs, team-level milestones, and deliverables.
- Teams can adjust quickly when they have access to real-time KPI dashboards displaying current performance and impacts.
- Teams can reduce waiting time and handoffs when they can see which particular outcomes their team is responsible for achieving.
Customer Success Story
Case Study: Practical Decisions Make Success Possible
A leader in aggregating, curating, and delivering entertainment had recently divested from another business and needed to move its Project Portfolio Management (PPM) data into its own systems. They also needed to create a real-time dashboard and establish new ways of working, all while continuing to deliver value to their customers.
...and they needed to do it all in just 6 months.
Solution
Praecipio helped set up their Atlassian tool stack, transfer and standardize data, and onboard teams to the new tools. Praecipio found data that had been hiding in different tools, translated that data into one common language, and, using Jira Align, Enterprise Insights, and non-Atlassian data sets, displayed it in a single-pane-of-glass dashboard.Suddenly, teams could see how their work was intended to impact an OKR. They could understand how tasks affected the metrics and make necessary adjustments. They could also see potential roadblocks to their work and determine ways around them before they became obstacles.
Results
Now, teams can forecast capacity demand much more quickly, track value delivery in real-time, and visualize and solve dependencies and risks with relative ease thanks to real-time reporting and improved data taxonomy.Connect: Resources
Write Your OKRs in 45 Minutes
Jumpstart your strategy and build a measurable path forward. Learn the anatomy of an OKR, how to craft one, and how Jira Align helps track OKRs to enable data-driven decisions throughout your planning cycle.
Watch On-Demand: prcp.io/okr-in-45
Connect Strategy to Execution with OKRs
Bring your knowledge of agile, an understanding of value streams, and background on your organization's setup. Walk away with tactics for linking team efforts to strategy, funding, and each other.
Save Your Seat: prcp.io/wrkshp
The Connected Enterprise
Together with the experts at Atlassian, we explore how Jira Align as a platform, when implemented well, can provide real-time visibility and improve coordination so that organizations can adapt more quickly to market changes.
Download: prcp.io/connected-enterprise
Your Vision Sucks: Price of Engagement
Your employees are how your company innovates and thrives. So, why do we care about happy employees? Highly engaged teams outperform the rest when it comes to business outcomes that are critical to the success of your organization.
Read More: prcp.io/price-of-engagement
The 2023 KPMG US Technology Survey Report found that companies have reaped the benefits of leveraging Cloud and XaaS technologies, with better data management integration being the benefit they cite most often, at 45%.
Yet, most respondents are still stuck in the migration phase rather than having the freedom to move on to optimizing cloud environments. And 51% still hope to connect data sources to enable advanced analytics and real-time visibility.
That sentiment is completely understandable. Consolidating and optimizing the data from many different cloud-based tools into one view is essential for making decisions with real-time, accurate data. Technology exists to help with this effort, including Alphaserve connectors, datamarts like Enterprise Insights, and data visualization tools like PowerBI, Tableau, and Atlassian Analytics.
Case Study: Real-Time Data, Not Manual Reports
The problem was, project managers were struggling to get intelligence from these systems to their leadership and ended up having to manually manipulate data into spreadsheets and slide decks.
Executives complained that, besides wasted time, the data was out of date and inaccurate by the time it reached them. It's tough to make a decision you can believe in with data you cannot trust!
Solution
Praecipio connected the client's Atlassian and Microsoft systems with a PowerBI integration using PowerBI Connector for Jira from AlphaServe (now Tempo) to aggregate real-time data in an executive dashboard.Results
Real-time data from a single-pane-of-glass dashboard allows executives to quickly see the status of ongoing work and any issues that need to be resolved. Teams save hundreds of hours each month without manual data extraction. With results like these, teams and leaders know at a glance where they have answers and where they need to ask better questions.Read The Full Case Study: prcp.io/4dR3qP4
Consolidate: Resources
Your Spreadsheet Is Not a Strategy
Planning spirals into wrangling endless spreadsheets across teams, eating up hours just to say, “We're on track.” Imagine instead, a clear visual of enterprise-wide data, aligning teams swiftly on strategy for quicker customer wins.Watch On-Demand: prcp.io/data-driven-webinar
Achieve Reporting Visibility without Major Transformation
Improving reporting visibility doesn't require a major overhaul—just strategic layering of reporting structures onto existing workflows, emphasizing access to real-time data for smarter decisions.Read More: prcp.io/reporting-visibility
Get Ready For AI with Improved Data Taxonomy
The surge in AI technologies like ChatGPT has urged businesses to leverage it for efficiency and agility. However, to harness AI's full potential, companies must overcome data fragmentation and manual processes.
Read More: prcp.io/ready-for-aiAppfire's Cloud Overhaul
Discover how Appfire streamlined its diverse cloud environments into a unified Atlassian Cloud instance with Praecipio's help. Optimized processes enable data-driven decisions and improved collaboration across the enterprise.Read More: prcp.io/appfire-case-study
A recent KPMG survey found that lack of coordination and governance among technology functions is the #1 hurdle for transformation progress. Coaching and training for more effective program interval planning and portfolio syncs are vital for full visibility into dependencies and risks.
Coaching and training is a critical piece for teams that are new to OKRs as well. People need help learning how to think about their work in terms of data, without going down a rabbit hole of too many interconnected initiatives or key results that are too hard to measure. Tying initiatives to objectives and determining how best to understand the impact of that work is a new skill for many people and one that will take some experimentation to get right.
Even if your budget doesn't stretch to full-fledged coaching, it's essential to remember the importance of conversations around what you see on your data dashboards.
Case Study: Don't Trust Data in a Vacuum
The power of the right conversation in the right place.
An example of the danger of trusting data in a vacuum came straight from Praecipio's marketing function. Last year, we sponsored several conferences and tracked our return on investment for each.
One of those conferences was brand new, and we were fairly certain it wasn't a good fit. The location was remote, the effort to attend was high, and the audience was on the edge of our target. But we wanted to try it and see.
Imagine our surprise to discover that we could directly tie a $300K deal to that conference!
Solution
If we'd stopped at the data, we would have invested in a sponsorship for the following year. Luckily, we did not.
Instead, we talked to members of the on-site team and discovered that our original assumptions were proven correct.
The audience wasn't the right one, and booth traffic was minimal. And the $300K contract? It came not from the attendees but from one of our fellow sponsors.
Results
Collaborating to uncover the stories around the data saved us from making a big mistake. Finding the psychological safety to share the bad news alongside the good is essential for making confident data-driven decisions.Understanding & Implementing Enterprise Visibility
Enterprise visibility is crucial for organizations aiming to break free from the overwhelming data overload and make informed, strategic decisions. By connecting, consolidating, and collaborating around your data, you can ensure that your business decisions are based on accurate, real-time insights. We've compiled answers to some of the most common questions regarding enterprise visibility and how to implement it effectively.
What is enterprise visibility and why is it important?
How can my organization achieve end-to-end enterprise visibility?
Achieving end-to-end enterprise visibility involves several key steps:
- Connect execution data to strategy by integrating tools and platforms like Jira Align to align team efforts with business goals.
- Consolidate data from different sources into a unified executive dashboard using tools like PowerBI or Tableau for a comprehensive view.
- Collaborate across teams to ensure that data is contextualized, discussed, and understood, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
What are the main challenges in implementing enterprise visibility?
The main challenges include:
- Data Silos: Data scattered across different systems and teams can be hard to consolidate.
- Tool Sprawl: Using too many tools can create complexity and make data integration difficult.
- Cultural Resistance: Employees may resist changes in processes or the adoption of new tools, especially if they are used to manual or siloed systems.
How does real-time data contribute to better decision-making?
Real-time data provides up-to-the-minute insights that are crucial for making timely decisions. When organizations have access to real-time data and cost transparency, they can:
- Quickly identify and address issues.
- Adjust strategies on the fly based on current performance metrics.
- Improve forecasting and resource allocation by seeing the immediate financial impact of their decisions.
Can AI tools enhance enterprise visibility?
Yes, AI tools can significantly enhance enterprise visibility by automating data collection, analysis, and reporting. AI-powered platforms can:
- Identify patterns and trends in large datasets that might be missed by human analysis.
- Provide predictive analytics that help anticipate future challenges and opportunities.
- Reduce the time spent on manual data manipulation, allowing teams to focus on strategic tasks.
Data taxonomy is critical for successfully implementing AI tools for enterprise visibility. Without organized data, AI models cannot operate at their full potential.
How can organizations avoid the pitfalls of misleading data?
To avoid the pitfalls of misleading data, organizations should:
- Ensure data is placed in the correct context, combining both quantitative and qualitative insights.
- Foster a culture of transparency where both positive and negative findings are shared openly.
- Regularly validate data through cross-functional collaboration and continuous review processes.
DIG A LITTLE DEEPER
Ready to Enhance Your Enterprise Visibility?
