You are not the only game in town

Executives have many teams reporting up through organizational structures and those teams have numerous initiatives underway and those initiatives contain a diverse set of projects. Just because you are living and breathing the portfolio of analytics projects, doesn't mean that your senior management team and sponsoring executive have more than a cursory understanding of the projects and initiatives that you and your team are engaged in.

This organizational separation is part of the reason why we have been discussing the need for the analytics team to be connected to a larger overall process of organizational improvement and transformation. Executives can only keep a certain amount of complexity and breadth of activity in mind at any one time. When they see that your efforts, and the efforts of your team, are supporting strategic initiatives, then you are aligned with their thinking and you will have their support.

It took me years to...