Tag: Dan Meyer

Marketing to Your Competition… Face Palm!

I get e-mails like this all the time…

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Dan,
I was doing some research on BPO Elite, and based on your previous interest, I was inspired to reach out to you for your guidance.
How much of the information within your data is locked away, hidden, and inaccessible in the moments you need visibility to it the most? Are you facing any challenges surrounding accurate forecasting? What would it mean to you to have everyone at every level of the organization, working from a single version of the truth?
We are helping organizations reduce the time to access relevant data by 95%. Is “good enough” really good enough moving forward to a new year in 2014?
With end of year promotions beginning now, the purpose of my note is to determine if this is an area of interest for your team and also the best person to speak with about achieving powerful business analytics and beautiful dashboard reporting.
Thank you for your time and feedback Dan.
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Insert Face Palm image > facepalm

So if you spend 10 seconds on any of my social media sites, its pretty clear that I am all about analytics! So in effect they are asking me to outsource what we do for a living to them?

I find this quite comical.

I imagine the person who sent this email is either going off a list or just spamming and hoping to get lucky. Because when you market to you competition you want to at least come off as you know you are marketing to your competition.

Recruitment Analytics… where both demand and need is greatest

Who’s left? > Reblog from one of my blogging heroes, Seth Godin.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/11/whos-left.html

This is EXACTLY why I have been able to run several successful recruitment analytics seminars in the past year. So many HR and Recruitment teams still approach sourcing talent like this…

“The classified section of the Sunday New York Times used to be more than twenty or thirty pages long. Now it’s down to one.

Part of this is due to the lack of new jobs in the post-industrial economy, but mostly it’s due to job listings moving online. I was fascinated to see some of the jobs in last week’s paper, and confess befuddlement at the thinking of those that ran them.

Here’s one, from Amazon, for a level II programmer in their New York office. Just a mailing address, no online method for contacting or applying. They’re using the newspaper to search for programmers unable to apply online, perhaps the best place to find this sort of programmer, but really, do they want them?

Or the ad from Paul, Weiss, a prestigious big law firm in New York. It’s the biggest ad on the page, and goes into a long, long list of requirements for the job–Magna Cum Laude from a famous law school, more than three years with one of their competitors, etc. Which high-powered New York lawyers are reading the last single page of newspaper classifieds?

And my favorite, an equally long ad for Deloitte that instructs the applicant to go to a website and enter a 15-digit code, including several “1”s, some “I”s and a bunch of letters and numbers. Almost unreadable in the paper, and hard to transcribe. More than a billion combinations… why not just enter NYT1124?

Lots of time and money being spent chasing the wrong people with the wrong ads.

My point, and I do have one, is that if your HR department is run by policies that were established a decade ago, worth a new look. And if you are serious, truly serious, that talent is your competitive advantage, please understand that the way you look for and sort that talent is the highest-leverage way you’ve got to increase what you end up with.”

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. You really have to Think Through The Box to come up with winning solutions to effectively attract, retain and manage talent in the Philippines today.

DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

Philippines Analytics Outlook 2014 (1 of 4): My Assessment

049As 2014 is on the near horizon, I have been asked by more than a few people what I think the next year looks like in terms of analytics and its evolution as both a service and a career path. Now more than ever, I think it’s the time to really up our game in both terms of training talent and providing analytics solutions.

Here is why:

• BPAP and some of the big analytics companies like IBM and HP are moving quickly to infuse more analytics focused content into the higher education system. DMAI continues to get more requests to be involved with turning students onto BPO and analytics careers than I can address myself.
• The demand for analysts still far outweighs supply and the talent gap will quicken throughout the year. If you type in analyst in jobstreet.com.ph you will see about 1500 jobs posting on any given day. That’s a 33% jump from where the demand was less that two years ago.
• More companies are looking to the Philippines as place to start-up analytics teams. I’ve had conversations with about a dozen companies on the past six months asking me how to go about it.
• The biggest demand is for Fresh Grads and Undergrads who have the critical thinking skills and decision-making confidence needed for analytics. SO that’s is where DMAI will focus in the first half of 2014
• The SMEs (small and medium-sized entrepreneurs) are starting to see the need for analysts but don’t have access to the talent available. If fresh grads are once again our priority, SME needs is right behind it.

So in the coming months you will see DMAI strive to do the following:

1. Continue to add more positions with DMAI to meet the demand of overseas clients. We plan to grow from 12 to 20 analysts by the end of January alone.
2. Conduct more trainings, including the one we are doing as a charitable effort to support the people directly impacted by the recent typhoon.
3. Present at more schools and professional events to continue to sound the call to action.

If you are interested in joining our team as we charge ahead towards our goal of being THE name brand in analytics in the Philippines, please send me us your resume to analytics@dmaiph.com.

If you’d like to learn more about how our analytics talent and solutions can help your business, please email me directly at danmeyer@dmaiph.com

The Most Ambitious Analytics Project I Have Ever Taken On

Pretty much every time I do an analytics training I talk about the most ambitious analytics project I have ever taken on.

One day back when I was still with Wells Fargo (circa mid 2008), my boss came into my cube and tossed a book on my desk. “Daniel, take a look at this. I when I come back I want to share with you a project I have in mind.” I knew he was going on a business trip that day and would be back in two days so I had that time to read the book and figure out what he wanted me to do before he got back.

The book was Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design and it forever changed my life.

dashb

http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167

When I saw the book I was immediately enthralled by the charts and graphs, at this point in my career I had built thousands of charts and graphs and data visualizations in excel and was generally considered a master at it. But up until that point I had never heard of the term business dashboard. It was obvious to me that the idea was a user interface to access business data in one view, but I likening it to a car’s dashboard was a brilliant way to make the concept easy to digest.

I spent most of the next two days devouring the book. And I knew what he wanted, some kind of intranet site to display all the different reporting metrics I was generating for the group and mainly diffusing via email.

When my boss got back from his trip, I eagerly anticipated his eventual reappearance in my cube.

Finally after lunch, his admin called me and asked me to meet him in the conference room. On the dry erase board he had sketched out the most ambitious analytics project I had ever dreamed of taken. He didn’t just want a place to post information and reports, he wanted something far cooler.

His requirements included real-time sales data, real-time scrolling exchange rate data, headline news data from various sources and he wanted it to be available on both desktops and on TV screen positioned throughout the floor so everyone can get a pulse of the business at a glance. It was brilliant, but it was also going to be ridiculously hard to do. I mean, he wanted a life feed from CNN. How was I going to get that?

But being the dedicated analyst, the next day I took his vision and created a one page power point mock-up. Once he felt I had the design the way he wanted I started checking around with different resources to see what it would take to pull this off. After several conversations with our project management team.. in-house developers and database owners, I came up with a figure of over $1,000,000. It was going to be a huge six month project to get everything in.

I kicked off the project and started putting together the project team…. and then we had an all team budget meeting. We need to cut some things out of the budget do and when the boss started going around the room and looking at each person , I already knew it… “Daniel, we are going to have to cut your data project”. Inside I cried, but I had been around long enough to know this idea wasn’t dead, it was just going to take a different form.

Two years later, we basically had built the dashboard but it took a lot different form then I had originally put together. We had the reporting metrics on an intranet site, we had an automatic system to feed us real-time FX rates, we were using the Tableau BI tool to develop some awesome data visualizations… about the only thing missing was the live CNN feed.

But boy wouldn’t it have been cool to build that dashboard the way we originally had dreamed it up!

About Me… something I threw together for a client proposal

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Dan Meyer established BPO Elite LLC, in the United States in 2010 and with the intention of setting up an analytics training and consulting business in 2012. After a 15 year career as a senior analyst with Wells Fargo Bank, Dan moved to Manila in May 2012 and immediately set up BPO Analytics Elite Inc.

During the next several months Dan trained over 75 fresh grads in the concepts of analytics and 2/3 were quickly able to find jobs as analysts in the BPO industry. BPO Elite was also hired as a consultant for a number of companies here in the Philippines.

In January 2013, Dan spun off some of his efforts into a new company, DMAI – Decision Making, Analytics and Intelligence. DMAI focuses on professional analytics training, management consulting and outsourcing. Dan has conducted several public trainings in 2013, training over 50 professionals for a wide range of top companies.

In recent months, DMAI has also taken on additional consulting clients here in the Philippines as well as begun to provide outsourcing services for six overseas clients. Dan also continues to empower students and young professionals via speaking engagements across Metro Manila.

Dan conducted seven sessions of the two-day, An Introduction to Analytics for Fresh Grads and Young Professionals between May and November 2012. In all he instructed over 75 trainees who he then helped find work as analysts. Over 2/3 found work as analysts in the BPO industry within a few months with various companies including Accenture, Citibank, Genpact, Emerson, Sencor, and GL Advisor

So far in 2013, Dan has also conducted six analytics and decision-making themed public trainings for professionals. Mainly targeting HR and Recruitment professionals, these interactive one day workshops have been attended by over 100 trainees. Some of the companies represented include McDonalds, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Manulife, iRemit, Lexmark, DestucheBank and Sitel.

Dan has also conducted in-house analytics trainings for the management team and staff of several companies here in the Philippines including Microtel, Kalibrr, and Medexcel Global Solutions.

Dan has worked as a consultant on a range of analytics themed projects for a variety of BPO companies here in the Philippines including GL Advisor (staff recruitment), Jumbo Shipping (outsourcing jobs from Holland), Microtel (setting up an HR and manpower business), Genpact (training junior staff on career opportunities as an analyst) and Medexcel (social media marketing campaigns).

Dan has set up several outsourcing analytics projects of various sizes and capabilities with companies from overseas including Dimedius (a Houston based healthcare consulting business, currently providing market research and demographics analysis), Kass Consulting Group (a Boston-based outsourcing firm, provided internet research on current trends and facts in outsourcing), ZoneApps (a Boston-based mobile application developer, provided content management for their mobile app), ArtFact (a Boston-based online auction house, managing a virtual team of eight social media analysts and customer service reps), IQR (an India based analytics outsourcing company, sub-contracted to provide data analysis and client presentations) and StatMarin (a San Francisco based analytics outsourcing company, sub-contracted to provide marketing campaign analysis)

Speaking Engagements
August 2012 – HR and Recruitment Summit in Quezon City
February 2013 – St. Benilde IT Summit at College of St. Benilde
September 2013 – Innovation Bootcamp at St. Scholastica College
October 2013 – Startup Challenge at College of St. Benilde

In addition, Dan volunteers to go to schools to talk about careers in the BPO industry as part of his membership in BPAP. To date Dan has spoken at a number of schools including CSB, PUP, and UMak.

Dan has appeared as a featured guest on a number of local media outlets around Metro Manila to talk about analytics, the BPO Industry and decision-making for SMEs. Some of the outlets include GNN, DZBB and the Armed Forces Radio.

Am I The Simon Cowell of Analytics?

Last week I had the pleasure to help out a good friend who teaches at the University of Makati. He teaches a marketing elective class to high school students who are in the new 11th grade. FYI for those not familiar the Philippines is in the process of instituting two additional years to the education system here so its on par with the US and many of the countries in having a K-12 program.

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Anyway, El asked me to be part of a panel of judges for the class as they gave group presentations based on marketing plans that they developed. The plan was based on a project they had been working on for a while which is to set up an operate as a small business. It’s a great way to train future entrepreneurs and would be marketing majors and it made me feel a little like Simon Cowell.

I was honored to be one of three judges and we spent about two hours as the five groups of 5-10 students each presented their plans. And the best part was all of the 5 groups had set up food sales businesses and had samples. It was a lot of fun and the food was masarp (Tagalog for delicious).

As each group presented their plan I gave them feedback mostly on how did they validate their assumptions, did they collect any data, did they survey, how social media could play into their plans, etc. In all cases, I stressed the importance of showing data and visualizing it in ways that could be more impressive to potential investors.

I hope my feedback and advice helped them fine tune their marketing strategies and I would love to see them again when they are ready for OJT “on the job training” for their college internship requirements.

It was a lot like the TV show SharkTank but with great snacks! 🙂

Analytics and Process Improvement

Had an interesting text conversation yesterday that I thought worth sharing as it brings up a good question… can you have process improvement without analytics?

I got a text randomly yesterday from a friend who is considering a new job as an analyst for a hospital.

flow

Friend: Hi Dan, I got a question on analytics. If I wanted to increase the utilization of rooms in a hospital, what kind of data should I be looking at?

Me: Do you want a well thought out plan or a quick and dirty answer?

Friend: I suppose quick and dirty.

Me: Length of patient stay. % of special needs patients. Physical dimensions of space to see if space is optimized. Understanding of patient process flow to see where wasted time is. Then put it all together to come up with some current metrics and then track against optimal case metrics.

Friend: What exactly do I need to be looking for if I go look at length of stay? What are optimal case metrics?

Me: To optimize usage, you need to gather data for key metrics as they currently are. And then project the same metrics is everything was working at its most efficient state. Length of stay is a key metric as you need to determine what is causing longer than expected patient stays. This will help you minimalism things causing wasted time. Analytics will identify waste and then you use metrics reporting to manage the waste. Make sense? This sounds like as much a process improvement project as it does analyst work doing some new metrics reporting. It could be a very interesting project with both short-term consulting on the process improvement and long-term need for an analyst to monitor the data via metrics reporting.

Friend: Yeah, you are making lots of sense. So, if I were trying to shorten length of stay, I would look at current length of stay per case. Then look for all the factors impacting length of stay, and then improve the process flow for the ones where its taking too long.

Dan: Something like this is how I would start.

Based on my experience, when you are presented with a business problem and asked to help solve it. It’s almost always an issue of a process that is inefficient or wasteful that is the root cause, but you need plenty of data to identify that. A good analyst is just as much a process improvement guru as they are a reporting expert.

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Analytics Consulting – As a founding member of Gloabl Chamber Manila, DMAIPH specializes in a variety of analytics consulting solutions designed to empower analysts, managers and leaders with the tools needed for more data-driven decision-making.

We have helped dozens of companies in both the U.S. and the Philippines, get more analytics in their business.

Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can tailor an analytics solution made just for your unique requirements.

How I Use Logic As An Analyst

Here is a follow up to the student I am helping with her class assignment on Logic… She asked me how I apply logic as an analyst with an example and here is what I came up with.

How I Use Logic As An Analyst

According to Webster’s Dictionary, logic is “the science or art of exact reasoning” and analyst is “someone who is skilled at analyzing data”. The two definitions are where I start when how I think back to the application of logic during my career as an analyst.

To solve business problems you need data. You need to identify the right data, analyze it and communicate your results. In all three aspects of analysis work you need to employ logic.

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes
Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes

When you are given a business problem to solve, say how to determine a market for a new project or trying to figure the cause behind a slowdown in production, you need to start with data. What data you get, how you get it and where you get it from is all driven by a combination of your business experience and logic.

Logic helps you eliminate data that useful to the problem at hand. One time when I was looking for data on current remittance flows to China, a logic driven approach would be to start looking at Chinese economic websites. Which I did using the science of logic.

Once I got some data sources on remittances from the US to China, I then used logic in my analysis. Is the data current? Is the source reliable? Is it relevant? Logic dictated that I not use sources that were more than a year old, where not from government sources and where directly providing data on remittances to China.

In my analysis I saw several patterns, most remittances where going to only two provinces. That is logical when you research to see that most immigrants to the US come from these two provinces.

And when I was ready to communicate my results, my choice on which application to use, what tone to use in my language and what visuals to use were all driven by my knowledge of the audience.

Since this was for a senior manager, well-versed in remittance patterns and very comfortable with big data speak, I just cut and past some charts from Excel into an e-mail and gave him 2-3 bullet points about the patterns I saw and noted my source. It was logical that he didn’t need a lot of explanation or easy to see analysis given his pedigree.

If this had been for a more general audience of say fresh grads who have never looked at this kind of data before, it would be logical to use PowerPoint, supply several descriptive notations and some easy to digest visuals that show remittance trends.

Trying to provide students with a report designed for senior managers is illogical for someone like myself with a lot of business analysis experience.

In the end, it is my opinion that few career paths call for a more consistent application of logic then does that of an analyst.

Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

Analytics > Based on the Principles of Logic

One of my trainees recently asked me for some help with an assignment she had in her philosophy class. Now I am such a Star Trek fan aka Trekie, that of course the first thing that comes to mind in the character Spock.

I imagine that is anyone ever took a formal survey of analysts and analytics professionals, most would list Spock high on their list of “cool characters.” The use of logic to solve problems is a key plot point in several episodes and movies. Anyway, I digress…

The assignment is to look at the paperwork in a business and determine how logic and logical principles are applied. I look at logic as being used primarily in two different facets of paperwork.

1. to set priorities… using deductive reasoning to decide what priority is more important and which one to work on first. This is something that is hard to teach and a common interview question. Trying to determine if a person knows how to establish priorities tells you a lot about how logical they think.

2. to establish procedures… logic is used to set up a process like an assembly line or a pipeline where things are done in a routine that is most logical. Being efficient and optimizing a process require a lot of logic in the design and implantation of the process.

So for paperwork… the paperwork that gets done first is the highest priority like payroll… logic dictates that paying employees is the most important and logic helps you set up a process for paperwork… like if a form needs three signatures, you would use logic to set the order of whose signature you get first, second and third

When you have a problem with a process or too many priorities to accomplish all, you use logic to help you solve the problem.

Analytics, or the discipline of using data to drive decision-making in a business, is closely related. Logic is used to identify the data you need, logic is required to interpret the analysis and logic is needed to determine how bet to communicate your findings.

When you look at any business (or government, organization, structure, etc.), you need to employ logic to make that business run and paperwork is a big, big part of the resulting of using logic. Forms, reports, summaries, etc… they are all receptacles of logic that are used to keep things moving.

So when asked why I do what I do when it comes to the paperwork in my business, I am going to tell you because its logical to do it that way. Or as Spock might say, “Logic dictates how and why we use paperwork.”

General Analytics – Analytics is the application of using data and analysis to discover patterns in data. DMAIPH specializes in empowering and enabling leaders, managers, professionals and students with a mastery of analytics fundamentals. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out what we can do to help you acquire the analytics mastery you and your organization need to be successful in today’s data-driven global marketplace.

DMAI – The Strategic Plan

Sometime I get asked the question, what is my strategic plan for DMAI. My answer is simple, “to be THE name brand when it comes to analytics in the Philippines.” Of course the next question is always, how will you get there?

Well, that is a little more complex. DMAI offers a variety of analytics solutions that all feed into our vision of being the top of the analytics pyramid. They include:

1. Partnering with countries abroad to provide analytics services to international clients.
2. Providing analytics solutions to companies located here in the Philippines.
3. Offering our expertise by coaching to executives and managers.
4. Conducting analytics trainings for companies and professionals located in the Philippines.
5. Empowering Filipino students and young professionals with the skills needed for careers in analytics.

So that’s a lot. How are we doing so far?

Let’s look at the data… I so love data!

Since May 2012:
> Directly trained over 70 fresh grads from almost two dozen schools.
> Trained over 50 Business Owners, SMEs, HR and Recruiting Professionals.
> Provided on site training and consulting for three small BPO companies.
> Completed over ten analytics projects for small businesses in the US and the Philippines.
> Made over a dozen media appearances on TV, Radio and the Internet.
> Set up analytics outsourcing agreements with five different companies based in the US and India.
> Spoke publicly at seven different schools here in the Philippines.
> Been a featured speaker at four different public seminars.
> Crafted over 150 blog posts.
> And am so close to finishing my first book.

We still have a long way to go, but DMAI is well on its way to achieving our goal!

dmai clients