Whether you are looking at an exciting new business opportunity or a comprehensive strategy transformation, monitoring the performance of projects is crucial in today’s business world. But what's the best way to measure your goals to know the success of your projects?
Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking progress against them helps determine if performance expectations are being met. Fortunately, enhanced data can make your measurement and project planning easy.
In this article, we'll go over what is considered enhanced data, how to set your measurement goals for your data project, how to set your KPIs, and how enhanced data can help you track (and crush) those goals.
What is enriched data?
For starters, let's go over what is considered enhanced data. Whenever you access a dataset--be that a data API or other unstructured data--you generally get raw data that has not been filtered in anyway.
With enriched data, you can easily search the data to find exactly what you need, thanks to the inclusion of tags. This also allows you to filter out things that are not related to your search.
Enriched data helps you measure your project goals
Once you have your project goals determined, data will help you get a tangible understanding of how successful your project has been. Ideally, your KPIs should be created with data in mind. It may be that you're not able to measure all of your goals, but you'll need to have a good understanding of interpreting data. Let's go over ways that data can help you measure your project success.
MORE: Why Data Visualizations Help You Discover Meaningful Insight Faster
What KPIs you can measure with data
Impact
Most often, the overall ambition of a project is to enhance a certain aspect of your business. Unsurprisingly each project will have a specific goal that necessitates a detailed understanding of the overall framework of the engaged entity. In order to successfully measure a project’s impact, you should therefore gather robust and comprehensive data between the start of a project and its finalization. This could be the impact of a marketing campaign and how many leads were generated based on the effort. Or, you can measure the ROI of automated technologies that help you streamline your workflow. Either way, enriched data will help show the impact your project has had on your business.
Finances
Continuous monitoring of all financial aspects within a project has to be implemented. Being on top of your project’s financial performance at all time provides you with the opportunity to act decisively and fast in case any adjustment has to be made, and having a good handle on your financial data will help you make sure that you're on track.
Time management
Solid time management is not only closely related to sound financial planning but also constitutes one of the most important steps in determining project performance. Monitoring the on-time completion of a project, together with previously established budget and timeline milestones, can substantially support the success of any activity. This data can be used to show your leadership team the efficiency of your project in reference to the impact.
Resources
Your project will need research to be successful. Using third-party, enhanced data to inform your project will help you find the resources to aid your research faster, so you'll never miss the insight you need. Furthermore, you can track what data was useful and add it to your report as you track your ROIs.
Quality
Knowing how the project developed in different phases is essential for evaluating the overall quality of the project’s implementation phase, which can be measured by qualitative or quantitative data. This does not only entail a final review of the project outcome but also includes a continuous assessment and adjustment of the managing strategy.
ROI
Has the project fulfilled its desired impact compared to the overall expenses it has created? Collect all of the data from other parts of the project to perform a detailed assessment of the return on investment, which will be of substantial value both for potential stakeholders and entity executives.
Why enhanced data makes you more successful.
Ultimately, enhanced data enables more successful project performance evaluations. After all, data that has been normalized and enriched—before you start using it—certainly contributes to positive KPIs. Less wrangling required equals faster time to insight.. More importantly enhanced data, when combined with intelligent technologies, helps you uncover actionable insights that can boost KPIs across all areas of business—not just those related to big data projects.
Take a closer look at how enhanced data can amplify the insights you get from data.