Building In-House Capability with Business Analyst Training
The Business Challenge
When a longstanding client expanded their services to several hundreds of stores across Brazil, the task load and complexity of their analytical efforts scaled simultaneously. At the same time the company was beginning to take in an order of magnitude more data and in turn establish more comprehensive business analysis and reporting, it was also struggling to find the internal resources to support such an effort. Up to this point, Komodo had taken the lead on business analysis, quantitative analysis, and reporting – but with demand for analyses now outgrowing the number of human hours that could be spent, a new solution became necessary. How could we increase the capacity of our client? Would it better for the client to hire more analysts, or to develop the capabilities of its existing staff?
The Komodo Solution
One way the client could have built its own BA team would have been to hire a group of individuals with pre-existing Looker, SQL, and business analysis skills – but Komodo saw this option as not only a significant financial invest that would take many quarters to complete but also as an underestimation of the aptitudes of its existing employees. Komodo knew that instead of spending ~$400,000 per year on 4 new analyst hires who would require significant ramping time, the client would be best served by making a smaller but more impactful investment by training existing staff. To facilitate this transformation, Komodo developed an 11-week business analysis training program to substantially build up the technical and analytical skills of the client's CX team. This training regimen focused not only on developing software-specific technical know-how, but more importantly a deep understanding of data and how to think critically about how it can be used for analysis. Komodo tailored the training to the specific outcomes the company needed and provided frameworks useful for connecting newly-developed skills to these desired results.
The Results
Over a 3 month period, Komodo moved quickly to assemble a training squad that could deliver a curriculum to cover the client's most critical reporting needs – data usage, metric design, and business analysis. After just 3 weeks of training, these trainees were able to perform critical business analyses which allowed several departments across the company to make important decisions in a data-driven fashion. With every training session, this team became more capable in thinking critically, understanding the interactions between data and systems, and designing and developing analyses that made logical and effective business cases. With more staff now able to perform critical analyses, the ever-growing backlog of BA tasks is now tamed by a team of highly capable individuals who deliver insights quickly. In receiving these insights faster and more accurately than ever before, various teams throughout the company are able to act more quickly and thus maximize impact and mitigate downside risk. In addition, the emergence of this new group of all-star analysts who are trained in metric design is leading the entire company to design better metrics, ultimately resulting in a more accurate view of reality and the ability to make better-informed decisions across the board.
