"Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different."
— Michael Porter
In the previous chapters, we established the team, defined the roles, and outlined the project journey (IDgRO). Now, we face the most critical decision a manager makes before a single line of code is written: Of all the possible projects we could take on, what should we actually build today?
Resources are finite. Your data science team cannot do everything. Every hour spent building a "nice-to-have" dashboard is an hour stolen from a "must-have" predictive model. Therefore, the art of management in analytics is not just about execution; it is about selection.
This chapter provides a framework for choosing analytics initiatives that survive. We will move beyond the vague "it would be cool to know X" and toward a disciplined portfolio approach that balances strategic alignment, feasibility, and financial reality.
Let’s be blunt about the political reality of analytics. As much as organizations claim to be "data-driven," the default operating system of most companies is still intuition.
Research consistently bears this out. In a survey of senior executives conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, intuition (30%) and personal experience (28%) were the top two factors used in decision-making, swamping actual data analysis (29%). A similar report from Accenture found that despite the hype around analytics, intuition remains the dominant force in the boardroom.
This creates a dangerous environment for the analytics manager. If you choose a project solely because it is intellectually interesting or uses a cutting-edge algorithm, but it does not align with the strategic goals of the intuitive leadership, you are building a bridge to nowhere.
Before you approve a project, you must subject it to a simple, binary test: Is this project strategic?
If the answer is Yes, do it. Strategic projects driven from the top down automatically have the executive air cover required to survive rough patches.
If the answer is No, you must proceed with extreme caution. Bottom-up initiatives that lack strategic alignment need to be rigorously justified. You will need to co-opt a project sponsor—a senior leader willing to spend their political capital to defend your work. Without this alignment, your project is likely to be the first casualty of the next budget cut. As a pragmatist, you align with strategy not just to help the company, but to keep your job.
"When you see a good move, look for a better one."
— Emanuel Lasker, World Chess Champion
Once you have identified a project that passes the strategic litmus test, do not stop there. A common mistake in analytics management is settling for the "good move"—the project as it was initially requested or conceived.
A competent manager delivers what was asked for. A Timeless manager takes a strategically aligned initiative and shapes it into something more profound than the original request. You must keep your eyes peeled for that little extra—the nuance or delivery mechanism—that can generate genuine excitement from your most passionate project sponsors.
This elevation often hinges on how you manage complexity. I call this the HCTP Principle.