When the BI Company needs BI..

Years ago, we decided to change our entire business model. We realized that we had to increase the speed of delivery and the quality of the service offered to our customers all through a more intimate delivery approach..

Behold our saving grace - The Subscription Service Model. The phrase has buzzed in my head for the last 5 years. Every day of my working life since our business changed has been about ‘frequent value delivery’. A focus on our customers’ needs rather than chasing sales, partnering with teams rather than contracting services. You get the idea.

However, it’s not all peachy. For example:

How do I know that my consultants are contributing equally towards our minimum float amount?

How do I know I’m using my teams efficiently?

Which contracts are experiencing churn?

What contracts are taking too many resources?

How do I know that my Actual Billings match work completed?

I can’t personally attend to all those questions and maintain my own set of projects. At this point in our business life we knew what made a successful deployment, we knew what the signs of uncooperative consultants were, but on the first of the month I still couldn’t tell my team at the opening scrum what to look out for.

Our instinct was to lean on the greats: Base camp, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics; and, if we’re honest with ourselves, committing to one of those may have answered all our questions and soothed our worries. Perhaps we would have seen the red flags we missed. Maybe the contracts we lost would have stuck around. We may never know..

The fact still remained, we needed something- something to look at in our management scrums. We’re an analytics company dammit. We were already recording all this data in our ticketing system and Financial system, so the next obvious answer was to leverage those to answer our questions. Of course- getting them to talk to PowerBI was another problem..