Baseline Your Organization

A key component of measuring success is measuring your progress. To do that effectively, you need to know where you start from. In this chapter, you will learn the importance of defining a baseline, both for the organization at large and for individual projects. Next, you will learn how to capture a baseline and who to communicate it to. Finally, we will discuss how to ensure agreement on the baseline before beginning work.

There are many ways to baseline the organization to be able to measure your impact, but one of the most common is through the use of a data maturity model. Throughout the course of my last ten years in leading data transformations, one thing is for certain: having a strong baseline is beneficial not just for your stakeholders but also for you. It gives you an opportunity to demonstrate how much of an impact you’ve been able to drive through your tenure as the leader and the measurable progress of your team.

We will discuss...