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To build a good people analytics team, take care of covering these 3 roles, possibly each one with a specialised resource:
- Data Modeller - to automate data collection from various sources and data wrangling, ensuring clean, consistent, quality assured data are readily available for analysis.
- Data Analyst - to create algorithms / to select best available algorithms to analyse the data at hand in order to tackle the problem.
- Business Analyst - to interface with the business, to provide assessment guidelines, to capture the needs, to frame the problem to the data analyst(s) and to explain the results / suggestions for the way forward to the business.
Among the three, probably the data analyst one is the most glamorous but the least important for a company as it is not really company-specific and good, very good resources can be hired for specific projects: I’d really suggest to let them focus on analysing the data, providing them with clean, consistent data and a well framed problem.
The data modeller role is the somewhat hidden workhorse of the team, but it is really vital as without proper, automated, data management and data preparation the complete workflow at the very minimum slows down and in the worst case breaks altogether.
The business analyst is the face of the team towards the business, the one preparing the field providing guidelines and pushing for data consistency in personal assessments, the one translating the problem the business faces so that data analysts can tackle it and the one translating the data analysts’ findings back to the business.