What is an Analytics Intake Process?
I pray that you have one, for your own good.
"We have an urgent request, it needs to be done this week."
If you've worked in analytics for any period of time, you've heard a statement like this. It's the worst.
Urgent requests derail you, plus there's a pile of pervious requests that you're working on (or procrastinating on), taking up headspace that should be used for more important projects.
If you don't handle the wave of incoming requests, you'll spend all day reacting to other people's needs instead of focusing on high-impact projects.
How do you wrangle all these ad hoc requests?
Have an intake process.
What's an intake process?
An intake process is a well defined set of steps for:
- Stakeholders to make requests of the analytics team.
- The analytics team to prioritize the requests
- The analytics team to work on those requests.
- Both parties to communicate about the requests.
The process should be smooth for both parties. It should be easy for stakeholders to make requests and easy for the analytics team to triage, prioritize, and work on those requests.
The composition of the intake process itself doesn't matter too much. What matters is that you adhere to the 4 attributes of a good intake process.
The 4 attributes of a good intake process
Your intake process must give people the ability to:
- Make a request
- Prioritize a request
- Work on a request
- Communicate about the request
If any one of these attributes are missing, you have an incomplete process.
If stakeholders make a request but it never gets prioritized, what's the point of making the request? If you work on a request but never communicate to stakeholders, what's the point of working on it? If stakeholders don't know how to make a request and contact people randomly, how will you prioritize the request against other work?
Once you build a process with all four attributes, the easy part is done.
Now people have to use it.
The most critical aspect of an intake process
Your intake process doesn't matter if people don't use it.
You need to educate stakeholders on how to submit requests and how they'll get updates. You need to train your team to ingest, prioritize, work on, and communicate about the request.
When someone (stakeholder or team member) breaks the process, get them back on track. Ask stakeholders to submit an intake if they Slacked you on the side. Ask team members to provide an update on the requests they've committed to. Communicate with stakeholders when something needs to be de-prioritized.
Having an intake process will save you hours of triaging requests in the future.
Work is too chaotic to reinvent the wheel every time there's a new request.
Build an intake process instead.