The Analytics Translator: HESPA conference reflections

I had the pleasure recently of presenting at the HESPA annual conference down in Birmingham.  This was my first HESPA annual conference and as someone who sideways stepped into the wonderful world of strategic planning a couple of years ago having worked in a range of other HE management roles, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  What I found was a collegiate, interesting, generous and thought-provoking community and it is in this vein that I share my reflections of the workshop my colleagues from Manchester Metropolitan University and I delivered on ‘the Analytics Translator’.

The Analytics Translator…

I first came across the term ‘analytics translator’ in a LinkedIn post of an ex-colleague from the University of Birmingham and intrigued by the phrase I did a little research.  The term originates from a Harvard Business Review and then McKinsey article by Henke, Levine and McInerney.  So what exactly is an analytics translator and why did it capture my interest? 

To summarise Henke, Levine and McInerney’s article, analytics translators bridge the gap between data analytics/scientists and the managers and leaders of an organisation, helping to ensure that targeted analytic insights are generated, in an easily understandable form, shared with appropriate organisational stakeholders and used to help solve an identified problem or enhance a key business area.

When I read this role description, it was a lightbulb moment for me and my first thought was “hang on a minute, that’s what my team and I do!” 

To give a little background, I started in my current role as Director of Faculty Planning and Operations working with the Faculty of Business and Law in May 2018.  This was one of four new Director roles created at Manchester Met as an expansion of the Strategic Planning Directorate in response to a perceived gap in high-level strategic planning support within Faculties and specifically for the Faculty-Pro-Vice-Chancellor/Dean and their senior team.  I’m a senior Faculty Business Partner, reporting to the Director of Strategic Planning and with a dotted line to the Faculty PVC – so a foot in both camps as it were.  I have a deliberately small team of Faculty Planning Officers and accreditation-based roles, the idea being that the Director is an influencing role that works with a wide range of academic and Professional Services roles to complete a diverse portfolio of work in support of their Faculty. 

To drill into the role in a little more detail and contexualise within the UK HE sector, the Analytics Translator has a number of key characteristics:

• Organisational knowledge – in our case this is knowledge of the Faculty of Business and Law and the wider University/HE context;
• General technical fluency – strong analytical and problem solving skills and good knowledge of available analytical models in order to know what might be possible and to help bring analytical insights to life;
• Project management skills – to be able to direct an analytics initiative from idea to production to adoption;
• And, Entrepreneurial spirit – in addition to the general enthusiasm, determination and ‘business savvy’ cited in the original article, in a University context this includes significant collaborative working, people influencing and political navigation, to ensure the intended positive impact of the analytics work.

The concept of the Analytics Translator gave me an incredibly helpful hook and framework with which to reflect on the work my team and I have carried out since being in post, as well as a way to consider how to enhance our work approaches and support for both the Faculty and wider University going forward.

Bringing the concept to life

To return to the workshop session at this year’s HESPA annual conference, my colleagues (Bea and Ian) and I shared some examples of work we’ve completed in the last 12 months which illustrated the concept of analytical translators and brought this way of working to life: example one, recruitment trend analysis that enabled Faculty leadership to review and nuance their student number targets; and example two, a new approach to market insight that played a key role in a Faculty-wide programme review leading to a refreshed and streamlined portfolio.

We then asked the workshop participants to split into small groups and reflect on whether they have examples of this Analytical Translator way of working in their institutions or if the work approaches we shared with them might be usefully adapted and applied within their teams.

The discussions that followed were lively; the Analytical Translator role had clearly resonated with sector colleagues in the room.  To give you a sense of these discussions, one group reflected on the usefulness of this way of working but identified that there was a training and confidence gap that they would need to support their teams to overcome, particularly around the communication and organisation contextualisation element of the Analytical Translator.  Another group flagged that securing the intended positive impact of the analytics work they support was the most challenging and often where things failed to fully land within their universities.  Following on from this point, a member of a third group shared that they currently had a ‘strategic translation’ gap in their institution and that this way of working might help them to implement and embed strategy more effectively.

Concluding thoughts

Strategic planning teams (or their equivalent) are increasingly relied upon by university senior leaders and management teams to support the development and implementation of strategy and a diverse range of projects and initiatives, while also providing insight and guidance in an ever more complex external environment.  The Analytical Translator concept is no magic bullet but perhaps it gives us a helpful framework to reflect on and share our ways of working and how we might go about evolving our teams and roles to better support our institutions and the HE sector in these interesting times.