Agile by Design

Chapter 17Business Implementation Planning

As the team hits the third release, it prepares to deliver the final model results to the business. By keeping to the release schedule, the team avoids overdelivering and overanalyzing. The analytic team develops a formal presentation to present the finalized results: Remember that the team has been sharing preliminary results and findings throughout the project, so nothing presented should be a surprise to the stakeholders. For some analytic teams, their work might end at this phase of the project, but staying engaged during business implementation planning has benefits for both the analytic group and the stakeholders (see Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1 Business Implementation Planning Considerations

Are We Done Yet?

Everyone asks: How do we know when our model development phase is really complete? There are two aspects of this—the first is that you must always be cognizant of your business's ability to consume the model output. Don't spend your time creating 10 predictive models when your business can only handle the implementation complexity of 1 model.

As an example, one organization with a renewal membership product wanted to create a predictive model to identify customers at risk of non-renewing their membership. They already knew that the churn rate after the first year was very high and then continually dropped in each subsequent ...