Background:

A provincial ministry was looking to accelerate the adoption of analytics, standardized metrics and reporting as a critical step to improving the effectiveness of services delivered by the 300+ consortium of non-profits. Complicating this effort was that these non-profit organizations had a variety of mandates, size, resources and IT/data sophistication.

Challenge:

The objective of this assignment was to accelerate the use analytics and standardized metrics to improve service delivery, but recognize the constraints:

1. The system had to be simple enough to be usable by any of the participating member organizations. Some of which, had limited computer capabilities and data literacy.

2. Be robust enough to be useful.

3. Provide a degree of standardized output to measure the most meaningful and important metrics.

The Approach:

Advanced Analytics and Research Lab was asked to help.  The approach started with a discovery phase to assess the current situation. This included interviews with key stakeholder and a review of the systems and approaches used by several of the members of the consortium.

Following this review, AAARL then built a standard Excel template with categories of key metrics for the non-profits to easy populate. Qlik Sense was used to pull the data directly from Excel and create graphic dashboards of the key metrics.

Of most importance to the adoption of the new tool, was the introduction of audience appropriate education. A complete user’s manual was developed and information was distributed via newsletters, speaking engagements, and other forums to all the 300 plus consortium of non-profits.

In addition, AAARL held four (4) hands-on workshops where participants could interact directly with the system, gain experience, ask questions and get personal feedback.

Result:

A single but simple Dashboard system was introduced that would help the individual non-profits with their service management but also help standardize reporting to the Ministry.

Effective audience appropriate training was delivered on the system as well as the basics of analytics for reporting but also to enhance their practical service delivery.