Just read Gary Angel's post on Resolving to have a Plan, where he writes :
To get an answer to a question – particularly a web analytics question, you almost always have to start with… the question!
Here's what I take away from his post (I reformatted Gary Angel's paragraph to break it up into separate thoughts that follow each other):
"….Unrealistic and nebulous expectations and a lack of defense against random ad hoc requests are both pretty bad consequences of not having a plan.
But the most serious consequence of not having a plan is that your analysts typically don’t know what to do either.
There are very few analysts who you could ever trust to conceive of an analytic project that is truly important and then execute on it.
The inability to do this doesn’t mean an analyst isn’t competent.
In fact, if an analyst can do this, they should probably be managing your business instead of analyzing it!
However, I'm not sure coming up of with a list of projects and what needs to be measured works unless the projects are metrics enabled - just coming up with the plan might not be that helpful unless you can deliver the metrics and business intelligence that's being asked for and expected.
