Boost your lab's value

Track your performance

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"Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures."" ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching.

Nothing beats repeated, simple action. The bigger the change you aspire, the more this is true. Becoming data driven is no different. If you want to base your decision more on data, why not start today? Why not start simple and keep it simple?

Track what is

Take a couple of weeks to collect data. You don't need to change anything.

Step 1: Identify an area where you want to grow. Let's say you want to reduce the time of experiment X.

Step 2: Take a little notebook that you can carry with you.

Step 3: Each time you do experiment X, write down the amount of time it took.

Register what is. Talk about it. Do you notice a change in attitude?

Track your efforts

Sometimes you need to make active changes. Take a couple of weeks to make small efforts to improve.

Step 1: Identify an area where you want to improve. Let's say you want to record experimental data better.

Step 2: Identify behaviors you want to introduce and behaviors you want to avoid. For example: Start write down data in standardized format. Stop writing data on little notes to copy later.

Step 3: Take a little notebook that you can carry with you.

Step 4: Make a note each time you conduct one of the behaviors.

Notice if tracking makes it easier to change.

Why tracking matters

What is the use of these exercises? You may think along those lines:

"Competitor Y just released a machine learning model. Probably we can't catch up. Not to speak of competitor X. They hired a top IT consultancy to build a data lake. They are three years ahead. We need something yesterday. You better deliver some of your advanced tech, or we are out of business. Didn't you say you build things? Pipelines? Custom deep learning architectures? Why don't you start building that one? Later we figure out the rest."

"Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world." ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching.

Taking actions based on data is one of the most ambitious goal you can set for your organization. Why? Because it involves change in behavior. The whole point was to change the way you make decisions, not? Starting to make changes in a simple setting is a great first step towards a mountain of small steps that take you to the top.

I have seen many projects where data science consultancies are brought in to provide fancy technical solutions that are supposed to lift the entire company up to the ranks of Google. Several consultants work full-time for a year initially. The technology is so complex, that only a few people in the company understand the inns and outs. Fortunately the consultants know what they are doing. They are professional, taking all necessary actions so that the organization can continue it's usual business. The results however are lacking behind; the project does not have much impact. The consultants are needed for longer.

Talking about Google, the are masters in taking small steps. Every year they start hundreds of projects driven by 1-3 persons. Most of those projects fail, but some turn out successful. Only then they scale.