Listen to the audio version of the story here. 

In this story see how a project team is able to level-set their project strategy and effectively drive their strategy to execution.

Leveraging Visible's new Advantage Project Portal, see how the team is able to define and drive their project strategy to execution - working from concept through implementation while delivering on project goals and objectives.

Before diving into the story, let's first meet the team. Nina, the Global Sales Channel Strategist, works for a home goods and furnishings retail business. In this story, she will lead the team to level-set and execute strategies to maximize their product sales revenue and sustain a competitive advantage in the market. Let's get started. 

Introduction

While in her office, Nina looks through the annual report to identify the market demand for home goods and furnishings in the retail industry for the upcoming fiscal year. Before getting started, she wonders if there is any way to jump-start the company's global sales channel strategy leading to an increase in product sales. She also needs to view product history and therefore needs access to data distributed across several databases and spreadsheets. Most importantly upon setting a strategy, Nina needs to know when her strategy is not being executed according to plan. Of utmost importance is working fluidly with her team members - who are responsible for driving the strategy to execution. So gaining insights that are actionable and based on real-time data become a critical data requirement of the project. Ideally, with so much data distributed across several worksheets, she hopes there is a way to easily consolidate the data into one area.

Nina recalls having a few calls and receiving emails from Visible Systems over the past month. She takes a closer look at the company's website, its offerings, and its value proposition. She notices the value proposition aligns with her project goals. She found she could get started very easily with no commitment or credit card. So after some fact-checking, she decided to try Visible Advantage.

Act I

Define project goals, objectives, strategy, and KPIs using the SMART Methodology.

Nina first invites John, a business analyst, and Zack, an enterprise architect to work together to develop business and enterprise architecture. John's goal is to define business planning statements, such as goals, objectives, and strategy. For example, in the next fiscal year, the goal is to identify the consumer demand for home furniture, the attractiveness of market segments, and how the furniture products should be marketed in those market segments. The objective is to create a consumer market segment based on specific characteristics, such as prior furniture purchases. Lastly, the strategy to meet these objectives is to identify the purchasing behavior of consumers. The primary focus of this strategy is to assist in the development of product marketing by identifying market segments, purchasing behavior in terms of how sales to consumers are affected by changes in price and product combinations. The first step is to define project goals, objectives, and KPIs using the SMART Methodology and somehow map previously defined data stored in several databases and spreadsheets to the SMART project goals and objectives. Thankfully, Visible has a transition template to easily and quickly do this. She views a 2-minute video to understand the purpose of the transition template.

John is able to level set the project strategy including its goals, objectives, and KPI's as "planning statements" in the Visible Advantage.  Zack immediately receives the update since Visible's Advantage Project Portal is a virtual workspace where team members can view and discuss all aspects of a project. Based on the planning statements, Zack chooses to create a project architecture that is based on the Zachman Framework.

Act II

Conceptualize project strategy in terms of data, workflows, and processes.

By way of referencing various model-based standards supported by the Visible Advantage; Alex, a data modeler, and Nicky, a system analyst begin to conceptualize the data, workflows, and processes that are necessary to execute the project strategy. Having completed the initial draft of the project architecture, Zach publishes the project to the web portal where all of the project members are able to view it, annotate it and post discussions. Nova notices a few business rules that need refinement. More specifically, Nova points out that some retail products need to meet certain criteria before they can qualify as "promotional" products.

Nicky updates the data model to include a relationship between retail products and the KPI Retail Data Mart. Alex takes note of this upon reading the discussion post and identifies the data entities and relationships across the entities required to satisfy the updated business rule. The changes are made to the project and the project is republished to the project portal. By applying machine learning algorithms to the metaverse where the strategy was previously conceptualized, the data model is automatically mapped to the appropriate data sources and the new queries are automatically generated.

It is pointed out to Nina that all changes are noted in the project history so there is full traceability of any changes that are made to the project's goals, objectives, strategy, business rules, data, and process models.

Act III

Inform strategy and pivot if necessary using actionable insights.

A big part of this effort is to bring "situational data" into focus delivering actionable insights to executives and stakeholders. Using Visible's proprietary mapping algorithm, the project conceptual models are mapped instantly to "situational data"  derived from both internal and external data sources. Since queries are automatically generated, data analysts can collaborate and generate visualizations while accessing data with no knowledge of SQL.  Nicky furnishes the connection data to executives and stakeholders all of whom are using a visual query builder to find insights across disparate and distributed data. Nina is impressed by the project team's work and how much they are able to achieve using Visible's new Advantage Project Portal.

Act IV

Nina shares insights and is able to execute the project strategy.

Exploring and analyzing data sets, Nina is now able to identify promotions that are the most effective, market segments that the company should target, and a pricing strategy for each segment. She is also able to easily aggregate data across multiple sources to determine customer taste and preferences and drill down to see which specific customers are more likely to take advantage of the promotion. She shares these insights with Paul who is in charge of marketing campaigns so that he can incorporate elements of effective promotions into his upcoming campaign.

In addition, Steve in the shipping department also gains benefits from these insights. He can now identify the impact of shipping costs on customer purchases and determine shipping costs accordingly. 

Conclusion

Through sharing the findings with different departments and executing the recommended strategy, Nina has observed a growth in revenue in the first quarter. Besides the positive impact on revenue, she has noticed several other benefits by leveraging Visible Advantage. As more information has been collected at the point of purchase, the platform is able to provide near real-time insights that have prepared the firm to sustain a competitive advantage through effective change management. Furthermore, it allows all business managers and IT members to discuss the projects and make changes when necessary to better align with business needs. Nina is glad to see the benefits of using Visible Advantage and starts to brainstorm for her next project. 

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