Know before you go

Cultivating, assessing, and obtaining executive support starts even before you join the organization. When interviewing for a new role and when new executives subsequently join the organization who have a direct or indirect impact on your team size, funding, and future plans, you need to evaluate the executives and senior managers to understand their history, perspective, and experience with analytics teams.

I have heard executives express the following views:

• We need to see significant changes resulting from the analytics teams in the primary operating functions in a matter of weeks.
• The analytics team should be staffed and running efficiently by next quarter.
• Our company has never been good at continual improvement; the analytics team will fix it.
• Our company has never been good at innovation; the analytics team will change that.
• We will have the advanced analytics and AI team build dashboards and reports in their "spare...