Have you lost your Mojo? Try our Data Dojo!
In “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” Dr. Evil developed a time machine to return to the 1960’s to steal Austin Powers’ precious mojo. In response, Austin travels back in time to foil Dr. Evil’s plan.
Instead of investing in a time machine (or the $3.99 streaming fee and 100 minutes to watch the movie), Hard Yards has created a simpler path to discover your organizational Mojo… it’s called our Data Dojo!
In late November, Hard Yards partnered with Spinnaker Consulting and MicroStrategy to deliver our first Data Dojo to a Department of Defense program office. The Data Dojo provides a pathway to “data literacy” defined by Gartner as “the ability to read, write and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied – and the ability to describe the use case, application and resulting value.” Data literacy not your bag? Don’t worry, we’ll get you caught up.
In the immersive five-day Data Dojo, you will learn by doing while leveraging your own orgnization’s data to showcase commercial best practices of data understanding, data preparation, and modeling to enhance decision making.
We begin the data dojo by exploring how enterprise architectures support the organization’s operational model, digital platform, and ultimately, the overall business strategy. Armed with an understanding of the business strategy, the cohort will learn how Agile software tools can serve as a data source for organizational metrics. We leverage business intelligence (BI) tools to focus on “process” metrics at the “tactical” and “operational” levels of the organization. The cohort learns concepts, such as Little’s Law, and how its own Agile data reveals insights between cycle time, throughput, and work in progress.
On the dojo’s final day, the participants create a dashboard of data visualizations and brief the results to organizational stakeholders. Finally, we close the dojo by developing objectives and a backlog of work items for an organizational data initiative.
Cohorts can expand the “process” metrics we explore in the Data Dojo to include “people” and “product” metrics. Additionally, they can integrate these selected metrics into meaningful and tailorable dashboards enabling data-driven decision making from the team level to C-suite.
So while we may not have mastered the art of time travel (yet), we think the Data Dojo can help your team rethink the way they use data to drive change. If you ever find yourself feeling like you’ve lost your mojo, I invite you to reach out to Hard Yards and consider our Data Dojo!
