Transforming Analytic Teams Through Strategic Intake Processes

Our Approach

To move clients from reactive chaos to focused execution, Analytic Vizion employed a six-phase, people-first methodology. Each step was designed to reduce friction, elevate transparency, and build trust across business and technical stakeholders.

Discovery Through Conversation, Not Assumption

Before building anything, we started with deep, relational discovery. Our team conducted interviews and facilitated collaborative sessions with stakeholders at all levels—project requesters, decision-makers, department leads, and analytics team members.

Key goals:

• Surface unspoken pain points and bottlenecks
• Understand the “why” behind requests, not just the “what”
• Identify patterns in how work was being requested, misunderstood, or delayed
• Capture the full spectrum of needs: strategic, political, operational, and emotional

Why it matters:
This phase created buy-in and clarity by showing stakeholders their voices mattered—and by ensuring we built the right system, not just a system.

Version 1 Process Design

Using the insights from discovery, we crafted a right-sized intake framework tailored to each client’s context. The goal was to launch a minimum lovable product—a process simple enough to be adopted, but structured enough to drive consistency and clarity.

Included:

• Intake form fields customized by client (e.g., department, sponsor, projected impact, estimated effort, timeline)
• Defined intake channels (e.g., Smartsheet forms, SharePoint portals, service desks)
• Visual project pipeline dashboards to show what was in progress, in review, or on hold

Why it matters:
You don’t need a perfect system to start. But you do need a usable one. V1 was built to be iterated—not to be static.

Pilot & Iterate

We launched the intake process with real projects—often starting with active in-flight work to create immediate visibility and structure. Over 2–3 months, we gathered usage data, hosted stakeholder feedback sessions, and identified friction points.

What we did:

• Paused or rescheduled low-priority work
• Defined prioritization tiers (e.g., Strategic Projects vs. Quick Wins)
• Refined form fields, dashboards, and decision workflows
• Eliminated unnecessary data entry (e.g., one client cut 172 intake fields down to 12)

Why it matters:
Process design is not a one-time event. A successful intake process must evolve with your people, culture, and business priorities.

Stakeholder Enablement

Tools and forms don’t work without people who understand how and why to use them. We trained both analytics teams and business requestors on how to engage with the new intake process.

Activities included:

• Live walkthroughs and demos for submitting, reviewing, and prioritizing projects
• One-pagers and how-to guides tailored to stakeholder roles
• Executive briefings to align on process value and sponsorship
• Templates for consistent scoping and estimation

Why it matters:
Intake is not just about project selection—it’s a conversation. Enablement ensures that conversation is clear, respectful, and productive.

Prioritization Governance

We established cross-functional prioritization councils or steering groups to review, evaluate, and approve incoming project requests. In some cases, we implemented lightweight scoring models or effort-impact matrices.

Key governance components:

• Transparent ranking criteria (e.g., estimated business value, effort, risk, sponsorship)
• Voting and reranking on a monthly or quarterly cadence
• Use of visual tools (e.g., 2×2 prioritization matrices) to drive shared understanding
• Capacity checks to prevent overcommitment

Why it matters:
Prioritization shouldn’t be political—it should be principled. Governance empowers leadership to make informed trade-offs and gives data teams air cover to focus on the right work.

Balance Strategic & Tactical Workloads

Finally, we ensured intake processes supported not only major initiatives but also the reality of day-to-day operations. Many analytics teams spend significant time on small enhancements, bug fixes, or ad hoc analysis.

How we built balance:

• Labeled requests as “Quick Win” or “Strategic”
• Reserved a portion of capacity for tactical items
• Created SLAs and intake lanes for enhancements vs. project work
• Tracked time spent on each category to refine future planning

Why it matters:
Ignoring tactical work creates team frustration and stakeholder fire drills. A mature intake system accounts for all work, not just the big-ticket items.

The Results

Stakeholder Satisfaction Soared
Stakeholders felt informed and empowered. One stakeholder literally sang with excitement over the new hotel intake solution.

From 25 to 3: Prioritization Clarity
Stakeholders and leaders aligned on the top 3 priority projects. Remaining initiatives were paused or rescheduled with clarity.

Increased Velocity, Decreased Friction
With context switching cut down by 60%, developers reported being able to complete projects 2x faster, with fewer revisions.