Stakeholder Flashcards
What are Stakeholders?
The people that have invested time, interest, and resources into the projects that you’ll be working on as a data analyst
What should you do at the beginning of each project?
Take time at the beginning of every project to identify your stakeholders and their goals. Then see who else is on your team and what their roles are.
What are three common stakeholder groups?
- Executive Team
- Customer-Facing Team
- Data Science Team
What does the Executive team do in the project?
- The executive team provides strategic and operational leadership to the company.
- They set goals, develop strategy, and make sure that strategy is executed effectively.
What roles might be represented in the Executive Team?
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Vice Presidents
- Senior-level professionals
What is the Executive Team interested in where the project is concerned?
- They think about decisions at a very high level and they are looking for the headline news about your project first
- They are less interested in the details.
- Time is very limited with them, so make the most of it by leading your presentations with the answers to their questions.
- You can keep the more detailed information handy in your presentation appendix or your project documentation for them to dig into when they have more time.
Who is often a good liason between you and the Executive Team?
The Project Manager
Who makes up the Customer-Facing Team?
Anyone in an organization who has some level of interaction with customers and potential customers.
What does the customer-facing team do?
- Typically they compile information, set expectations, and communicate customer feedback to other parts of the internal organization.
- These stakeholders have their own objectives and may come to you with specific asks. It is important to let the data tell the story and not be swayed by asks from your stakeholders to find certain patterns that might not exist.
Who is a Data Science Team made up of?
Data analysts, data scientists and data engineers
Data Analysts role in the Data Science Team
- There’s a good chance you’ll find yourself teaming up with the Data Science Team during the project
- A big part of your job will be collaborating with other data team members to find new angles of the data to explore.
What do Data Scientists do?
- Say you look into the data on employee productivity, while another analyst looks at hiring data.
- You then share those findings with the data scientist on your team, who uses them to predict how new processes could boost employee productivity and engagement.
Roles within a Data Science team
Feel empowered to say “no”
- Let’s say you are approached by a marketing director who has a “high-priority” project and needs data to back up their hypothesis. They ask you to produce the analysis and charts for a presentation by tomorrow morning.
- Maybe you realize their hypothesis isn’t fully formed and you have helpful ideas about a better way to approach the analysis. Or maybe you realize it will take more time and effort to perform the analysis than estimated. Whatever the case may be, don’t be afraid to push back when you need to.
- Stakeholders don’t always realize the time and effort that goes into collecting and analyzing data. They also might not know what they actually need.
- You can help stakeholders by asking about their goals and determining whether you can deliver what they need. If you can’t, have the confidence to say “no,” and provide a respectful explanation.
- If there’s an option that would be more helpful, point the stakeholder toward those resources.
- If you find that you need to prioritize other projects first, discuss what you can prioritize and when.
- When your stakeholders understand what needs to be done and what can be accomplished in a given timeline, they will usually be comfortable resetting their expectations. You should feel empowered to say no– just remember to give context so others understand why.
Make a list of potential roadblocks
- Before you start a project, make a list of potential roadblocks.
- When you discuss project expectations and timelines with your stakeholders, give yourself some extra time for problem-solving at each stage of the process.
