Pick the Fun Way!

Can you imagine your customer coming to you at the end of a project to say: "Your project has helped restore trust in Data across our company. This project has delivered twice the value of any previous project I have started in this company."
That's a good result ... a great result but it did not always feel like that during our nightmare project. in fact, halfway through this project I was ready to declare this the worst project I have ever worked on.

How did it turn around? What made it so great. Well Picking The Fun Way was definitely a part of the transformation.... we also needed to deliver in their waterfall fashion before we were allowed to be more agile, we had to bring stakeholders together so they could talk and solve problems for us, we had to make their problems visible so they could not run away from them and hide in different silos. And do all this while having fun ..

Transcript

1. Pick the Fun Way! How we turned around the “worst” project Melika Nafarieh & Martin Chesbrough
2. Our Challenge … Make it Fun! How do you turn around a project with no apparent business value, misaligned stakeholders, years of neglected complexity and trust gone missing ?
3. This Is What We Want 01 THE TECHNICAL RFP List of source systems - Stripe - Zuora - RevCat - Google Ads - Meta Ads - Bing - TikTok - Homegrown systems Technical Architecture - Master Data Management - Star Schema Technical Components - BigQuery - Airflow - Dbt - Looker JUST DO IT! We seem to be missing the Business Value?
4. Discovering A Shocking Scope 02 ONCE WE STARTED Complexity we found We had a mountain to Complexity we expected
5. Don’t Demo without Approval 03 THE NEXT SHOCK • We wanted feedback • So we decided to demo what we had done … early • We surfaced problems • Which is NOT what our stakeholders wanted!
6. Perfect On The First Try 04 THE BLOW UP • Need for perfection = BIG design upfront • Low levels of trust
7. Need a Predictive Plan to Build Trust 05 CHANGE TACTICS • A thorough timelines with task and release plans • Not fun but helped build trust! There is NO change without trust …
8. 06 MAKING A CHOICE Delivering First, Then Iterating • Gained trust through planning and delivery
9. • Fun and creative retros • Use fun to foster openness and encourage honest, comfortable team discussions 07 PICKING THE FUN WAY Creating A Safe Space
10. • Our data problem was a value stream … from source systems to marketing dashboards • Workshops with sales and marketing to understand the flow of data from end-to-end 08 CONNECTING ACROSS THE LARGER TEAM Involving Marketing In The Process
11. One Cross-Functional Team where we understand our INTER-DEPENDENCIES 09 CREATING ONE FUN VIRTUAL TEAM Creating a Cross-Functional Team Weekly marketing meetings to find data reporting issues Weekly governance meetings to diagnose the problems Daily (larger) team meetings to clarify and fix the reporting issues Weekly infra meetings to fix the data sourcing issues
12. This is what FUN looks like …
13. “This project has fundamentally changed the way our organisation thinks about and uses data - Customer CTO ”