Summary

Building an advanced analytics and AI team is the same as building any other high-performance team in several respects, but in other crucially important respects, it is the converse of what you would expect. There are also nuances and subtleties that, even today, elude executives and senior managers.

Analytics teams, and those inpiduals that comprise those teams – the highly talented and skilled people involved in scoping, designing, building, testing, implementing, deploying, and in some cases, maintaining advanced analytics applications, systems, and environments – are unique.

In this chapter, we have examined the organizational context and considerations that may not be obvious when building an analytics team. We have provided a framework to use when thinking about the type of analytics talent that you may want to hire and how that talent can come into the new organization and have a positive impact in a matter of weeks or days. We have outlined how you can consider hiring people outside the typical population when building your team.

With the organizational and market context set and the foundations defined, let's move on to Chapter 3, Managing and Growing an Analytics Team, where we will continue our discussion of how to build an analytics function that transforms an organization at numerous levels.