Identifying the business objective

The key to this task is to identify the goals of the organization and frame the problem. An effective question to ask is, "What are we going to do different?" This may seem like a benign question, but it can really challenge people to work out what they need from an analytical perspective and it can get to the root of the decision that needs to be made. It can also prevent you from going out and doing a lot of unnecessary work on some kind of "fishing expedition." As such, the key for you is to identify the decision. A working definition of a decision can be put forward to the team as the irrevocable choice to commit or not commit the resources. Additionally, remember that the choice to do nothing different is indeed a decision.

This does not mean that a project should not be launched if the choices are not absolutely clear. There will be times when the problem is not, or cannot be, well defined; to paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there are known-unknowns. Indeed, there will probably be many times when the problem is ill defined and the project's main goal is to further the understanding of the problem and generate hypotheses; again calling on Secretary Rumsfeld, unknown-unknowns, which means that you don't know what you don't know. However, with ill-defined problems, one could go forward with an understanding of what will happen next in terms of resource commitment based on the various outcomes from hypothesis exploration.

Another thing to consider in this task is the management of expectations. There is no such thing as perfect data, no matter what its depth and breadth are. This is not the time to make guarantees but to communicate what is possible, given your expertise.

I recommend a couple of outputs from this task. The first is a mission statement. This is not the touchy-feely mission statement of an organization, but it is your mission statement or, more importantly, the mission statement approved by the project sponsor. I stole this idea from my years of military experience and I could write volumes on why it is effective, but that is for another day. Let's just say that, in the absence of clear direction or guidance, the mission statement, or whatever you want to call it, becomes the unifying statement for all stakeholders and can help prevent scope creep. It consists of the following points:

• Who: This is yourself or the team or project name; everyone likes a cool project name, for example, Project Viper, Project Fusion, and so on
• What: This is the task that you will perform, for example, conducting machine learning
• When: This is the deadline
• Where: This could be geographical, by function, department, initiative, and so on
• Why: This is the purpose behind implementing the project, that is, the business goal

The second task is to have as clear a definition of success as possible. Literally, ask "What does success look like?" Help the team/sponsor paint a picture of success that you can understand. Your job then is to translate this into modeling requirements.