Steps

You should take the following steps to complete this assignment:

Step 1: Review the material.

What I learned:

Collaboration challenge

Because the technicians are highly specialized in their job, they can hardly get helps from other divisions in daily operation. Therefore, many of them build up the style and mindset of working on their own and neglecting needs of others beyond their knowledge and responsibility. The introversive character of most technicians also put weights on the problem.

Time challenge

Some technical teams have to work in the night shift in order to reduce their intervention with the normal business, leading to fewer opportunities for interaction with the other people in the business.

The strategies to solve the three challenges will include creating a glossary index of technical terms for other people in the organization, have technical teams understand the goals of the business and encourage them to express their opinions and difficulties they faced in their job towards achieving the goals. Team building activities and annual company offsite events could also boost interaction between teams working in different locations and shifts.

There are three challenges for getting technical teams to interact with the rest of the organization: Frustration in Communication, Individualism, and Team Morale.

Technical Communication: When technical teams communicate with customers, they tend to use technical jargons without explanation.

Thus, customer frustrations arise. Technical professionals don't always consider the situational context of other people in the rest of the organization. They sometimes focus on their role in the technical environment, without real consideration of the roles of other team members. Technical team members are typically very interested in the parts of the environment where they're knowledgeable and involved.

However, sometimes they neglect to get involved in areas beyond their scope of responsibility, even when their knowledge can be very helpful.

Individualism: Technical professionals tend to work apart rather than interdependently due to the nature of the technical tasks. Also, they sometimes lack of the whole picture of the business objective, and hang out only in the technical circles.

Team Morale: Technical professionals value the accuracy, efficiency and creativity in project delivery, while business professionals value profitability, growth, and business vision in a bigger picture. Business professionals tend to request for a vague/ big picture project delivery from technical teams without considering the viability and details, while the technical team excels at the details of technical projects without understanding the business purpose. Due to such nature, miscommunication and unsatisfactory delivery happens and conflicts arise. Therefore, technical professionals feel their work is not truly valued by the business professionals

To overcome these challenges, technical team managers, business professionals, and technical professionals should all recognize the value of motivation, business objective, and flexibility to the success of technical professionals.

First, technical professionals should have motivation and purpose in their work. If technical professionals believe their work is challenging and innovative, provides the opportunity for recognition, growth, and advancement; and it gives them freedom for independent action, they will strive to meet the demand of job independent of its degree of difficulty. Technical managers and business professionals should be able to explain the business goal to technical professionals in a Clear, Fun, and Highly Motivating Way.

Second, business professionals and technical professionals should communicate regularly to define business goal and objectives. Technical professionals should have a complete understanding of the business from the beginning to end, so that they see themselves playing an active and genuine role in the organization. As a result, they feel they are significant and what they do is truly valuable.

Third, the technical manager should recognize the differences in the nature of technical practices and make the work environment flexible. In order to avoid the risk of destroying morale and excitement in the organization, the technical team manager should understand the strengths and difference of individual team members, support flexible work habits and allow for team and individual performance.

Step 2: Select an organization profile.

I have a project that needs to create a proof of concept for analyzing the advertising segments to be addressed and used for a proposed new product. This is a test for now, not a production system. We need it completed in a few weeks and tested against some existing marketing data. A competitor may emerge soon. What resources do I need?

Step 3: Develop and author a business plan.

Consider your options for building an effective analytics team to meet the needs of the organization. Build a plan that includes the following elements:

• An analysis of the problem and its relationship to the organizational context. Describe the organizational setting, including its current analytical capabilities and the specific needs you are trying to address in the development of an analytical team.

• A summary of the gaps. A summary of the gaps in the existing resources and what capabilities are needed to address the organizational problem.

• A discussion of the structure of your team. Articulate what role each team member would play and how you would structure these resources. Be sure that you include an explanation of why you have structured the team as you have.

• A summary of the benefits for building analytical capacity. Remember the importance of communicating about analytics to non-technical professionals. How will you defend the resources used to create this team and build our organization's analytical efforts?

Assessment

In assessing this assignment, I am looking for evidence of the following:

• You were able to communicate principles and effective implementation strategies for building and maintaining an analytics team

• You were able to assess an organization's analytical maturity and design appropriate analytics strategy to meet organizational needs

• You were able to synthesize and apply the reading material, present concepts clearly in a written format, and create a coherent, well-supported plan to build out an effective team.