Data Science teams have proven to have a high ROI for companies. They can provide insights and discover patterns that companies couldn't figure out before Data Science.

So, what's the most valuable project a Data Science group can do? It doesn't have to do with Machine Learning or anything fancy like that. The project with the biggest ROI is actually quite simple and is proven to make your Data Science team stand out every time.

The project is showing off your team's impact on the organization. Whether that's time saved, cost reduction, or increased revenue. It needs to be collected and needs to be in a dashboard or report.

Why?

Many people in your organization probably don't understand Data Science. For those who don't understand Data Science, they probably don't know how much your team has positively impacted the organization.

Speaking from experience, once I displayed our team's metrics on cost reduction for the company, it started to open eyes. We started to get a ton of visibility and even more work. We started to work on bigger, more meaningful projects. This is all because everyone, including executives, started to understand what we did and the impact we have on the organization.

What should I report on?

This really depends on the type of work you do and the organization you're apart of. I suggest having a dashboard listing out all of your projects, or a better term to use would be "solutions".

Each solution should have three elements for your dashboard. The first should be a quick one sentence summary explaining in the simplest terms what your solution does.

The next element should be a quick sentence explaining the impact it's had or what I refer to as the "benefit" . For example, "reduced total cost by 23%" would be a perfect example of the benefit of the project.

The final element should be a quantitate metric. An example of this could be capturing the the total cost reduction for each project and listing out that dollar value.

Sometimes it can be hard to calculate the exact savings, so I usually note that everything is an estimate.

What should it look like?

Since the purpose of this is to show your organization the impact your group has had, the dashboard or report should scream the total dollars saved (or increased) and the amount of solutions your team had developed.

Make sure that metric is the centric point of your dashboard. Then you can break down that value into the seperate project where you list out the summary, benefit, and dollars or time saved.

It's a must

This report is a must for any Data Science team. It's a way to increase visibility for you and your team. You want everyone to know how much positive impact your group has had on your organization.

It's important to show it off!

Have you done something like this for your team?