Small budgets in young businesses are frustrating. They prevent to address all seemingly urgent questions about R&D and business strategies with analytics. How to handle this?
You need to prioritize these questions and work with analysts with strong listening capacities to understand your field, your needs, and your resources.They should also be in the habitof working with different methods and dataset sizes to be able to adapt to the context of your business.
To prioritize your questions, the first step consists in establishing a list of all the needs of your teams. The perspectives of all those individuals might differ, and it can be enlightening to hear their views to take proper decisions. Their expertise will also be important for the following steps.
Afterward, you can organize meetings between employees and analysts to rank the needs according to their expected benefits and feasibility. Here are some of the points to discuss during these meetings:
Translate needs into questions and hypotheses (e.g., Need = finding new procedures to increase customer retention / Question = which procedures X, Y, or Z improve the most customer retention? / One of the hypotheses = X benefits more the customer retention than Y)? The analysts will help with the formulation of the questions and hypotheses.
Exclude needs which cannot be translated into questions addressable with analytics.
Estimate the gain and loss of conducting or not an analysis to address each need. If you have a new procedure in mind, how much do you expect to lose if you apply this procedure when it does not provide any improvements. Same question if you do not apply it when it does provide some significant improvements? Here answering these questions strongly depends on the expertise of your non-analyst teams, but analysts can help with estimations. This step will help to estimate the expected benefits of conducting each analysis.
Communicate to the analysts the size effects which will make a difference to the business performances. Do you need at least 10% increases in customer retention to make a real difference? This information will condition the size of data sets needed (see below).
Share with the analysts the amount of risk that the company is ready to take. If you are estimating the sale volumes expected in a new area, how much can those estimates be away from the real value to be safe?
Share with the analysts what you consider to be reasonable probabilities of taking wrong decisions from the results of the analysis. Analysts can translate these probabilities into potential financial losses and use them to estimate the amount of data needed for analyses (see below).
From all this information and for each need, analysts will suggest analytical procedures with precise estimations of the amount of data needed.
At the end of the present procedure, you will be able to calculate the cost and duration of each analysis to address the different needs which will directly impact their feasibility.
At the end, you will have a good estimation of the potential benefits of addressing each need at the same time of the feasibility of associated analyses to prioritize which of these needs should be addressed with your tight budget đ
