2 Exercise: Project Progress - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->All right, let's return to your course projects,</v> time to put you to work again. Remember your project is to develop an AI strategy or a solution to an AI problem in the organization that you chose the last time. So building on the project that you've already started, you're going to follow these steps to figure out your strategy. Now think through each step. So when you're describing where you are, you're going to be using facts and data. When you're envisioning where you want to go, you're going to be using ideas or maybe key performance indicators. When you assess what can stop you, you're going to have objections maybe from people or obstacles that are in the way. And when you define your plan, focus on the near end things first, what are the next steps that you can use to pilot your idea? So that's maybe a more concrete way of thinking about the strategy as you go through step to step. And we want you to do is to start with that first step in the strategy to describe where you are using facts and data. And so think about what your before picture looks like. So ask yourself some questions from where you are now, what AI is in use today, or what other solutions have been tried, or even non AI solutions that have been tried to solve this problem and how well have those solutions worked? And what obstacles do you face in assessing your organization for AI? So is this something that makes it even difficult to describe where you are, try and figure those things out and how does it hurt your organization that you have no AI strategy or that you don't have a solution for this problem that you've put together and what's going to happen to your organization. If you continue to miss out on the power of AI. Now, remember as you're going through this description, keep asking yourself why, why did you say that? Why was that your answer to the question? Keep digging until you get down to something that's exceedingly clear. What you want to focus on is which KPIs will actually show success. So might your organization even needs some new KPIs? Maybe that's the reason the problem hasn't been solved because nobody has developed a key performance indicator that people are tracking to that really shows how bad this problem is, but maybe you're improving existing KPIs. So if you are be very specific, so are you trying to improve sales 3% in the next 12 months or reduce the sales cycle by 10% by May? What are you to do? Or you're trying to shift 10% of sales to online in the next six months? Those are just random examples, but that's how specific you want to be. What is the KPI that's really going to show what's your after story is when you've solved the problem, because you want to use the data to explain what's your vision is what is your after picture, because that's what you're going to focus on next. What is your vision? What are the ideas? What are the KPIs that will, what will they look like when you've solved the problem, or when you have your AI strategy in place? So, one way of asking the question is what is success look like and what will be the strategic effect on your organization after you succeed? And what other benefits are there that maybe aren't strategic benefits? Maybe there are tactical benefits, like improvements in certain areas that maybe aren't your key performance indicator, but they're happy side effects. And what are the actions that you will take to get there? So what are the first set of things you could think of? That's not your plan yet, but there are certain kind of big picture things that you know you have to do. Again as before use the power of Y don't just settle for surface things, really figure out what it is that is persuasive, is clear, because remember you're always trying to convince someone. Now how would you show ROI return on investment for your plan? So here we show the standard calculation for return on investment, but if your organization uses some different way of calculating ROI, just use that, it's fine. And maybe just tackle the ROI for your first AI idea rather than the entire strategy, because it might be a little easier to maybe get your arms around. And that's really what we want you to focus on is some kind of quick win that you can show the return on investment for. And so what are the questions that you have to ask in order to calculate ROI? Well, you want to know what are the new costs that your idea forces spending on and how do you estimate them? If it's hard for you to do, is there somebody you can ask? Is there somebody you can get help from that will help you estimate those costs and same thing for the return? How will you project a return who can help you to estimate what the return might be? Whether it's revenue, profit, whatever the thing is, it could be cost savings. What is the thing that's going to help you to show the value of your idea? How do you estimate that amount and how do you tie that return to the change you're making? How can you be sure that it's what you did that actually made that ROI happen rather than just something else random that happened at the time. And as you do all these things, keep your decision-maker in mind are the arguments you're making clear to them. Are they persuasive to them? Are they going to motivate them to do the thing you want them to do? So let's summarize what you're doing in these exercises after this lesson, you're going to describe your current situation, your before picture, you're going to think about what the KPIs are. That really are the things that prove that what you did is a success. Then you're going to lay out your vision for the future. What is your after picture? What will things look like after you succeed? And you're going to develop your business case to show the ROI from your first AI initiative. So don't just sit there, go ahead and do all this work on your project. I'll be right back here when you're done.