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- The Excel list was a joke.
Ever heard of Frank Williams?
Sir (as he later became) Frank Williams set up the Formula One team “Williams Grand Prix Engineering” in 1977, and by 1997, the team had won the World Constructors’ Championship nine times.
That’s more than McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull have achieved to this day!
But Sir Frank retired, passing away in 2021, and the team has been in the doldrums for several years.
The current Team Principal, James Vowles took over in February 2023 and recently spoke about what he found:
“I knew on day two, really, when I walked through the door, how difficult this was going to be,” Vowles admitted on the eve of the season in Bahrain.
“It doesn’t take long walking around Williams before you realise that there is very little compared to what I was used to. I don’t just mean in terms of facilities and buildings but processing data, there wasn’t even data on how much a component cost.
There wasn’t even data on how long it took to make the component or how many components are in the system.”
Not enough data. And not the data he needed.
Does that feel familiar?
“The car, as I looked at it 12 months ago was an Excel list. It’s [more than] 20,000 components. Think of every nut and bolt that we require from it.
The Excel list was a joke.
It’s impossible to navigate around it to understand what you need and then it was impossible to update.
But that’s how the car was built before I joined.”
It’s an organisation built on Excel. It’s clunky but it’s all you’ve got.
Does that feel familiar?
“Everything I’ve just described to you, it doesn’t worry me for a second, because it’s all fixable and it is opportunity that does not exist anywhere [else].
It is an opportunity that’s not small, it’s millions of pounds of cost cap money, and its tenths of performance in just having processes, structure and system,” Vowles said.
It’s fixable and it has a direct impact on performance.
Does that feel familiar?
So what lessons can we take from James Vowles?
You can run a cutting edge business with a clunky spreadsheet and a lack of data
Williams haven’t won races consistently for a long time, but they successfully put competitive cars on the grid, at races all around the world. It was more stressful than it had to be, and others outperformed them, but they did fulfil their obligations as a Formula One team.
This is why you won’t get Board level buy-in just because the data’s not much good and the tech is outdated.
They know (and you’ll have to admit) that your organisation functions well. You are actually trying to improve things rather than fix them.
So have that in mind when you make your proposals.
The data doesn’t tell you what you don’t know. You need subject matter experts
When he says it, it’s obvious that you need to know how long a component takes to make, but would you have stated that as required data if I asked you before you read this article?
It works the other way round as well. The data or tech teams may go to a lot of effort to fix a “data problem”, but if it wasn’t something that impacted the running of the organisation, then it was effort that should have been invested elsewhere.
Not only must the subject matter experts guide you on how the business works, but by supporting their efforts, you gain them as advocates and sponsors.
Spend on improving the situation is an investment, not a cost
Sport is different to most businesses, because there is a race (or match or competition) on a regular basis where your performance is measured against your peers.
In other fields, the link to improved performance less obvious as your cost savings and revenue increases will play out over time; and comparisons to your peer companies will never be precise as you don’t have the same objective in the way that sports events do.
Where you do have an advantage is that you can work with qualitative feedback as well as quantitative.
For example, your colleagues may provide feedback or quotes about how it has benefitted them and their team; which is not as visible when successful is measured in points or profits.
Takeaways
Always remember that organisations can survive reasonably well even when they don’t manage data that well.
Find and work with the subject matter experts so you can understand where to focus your energy and resources.
Think about demonstrating the benefits of your activities - this can be qualitative as well as quantitative.
What’s your biggest data quality challenge? Tell me and I will send you back THREE actions that YOU can take to help.I have a couple of events coming up:
For insurance people, I’m doing the next dataZED Get Together on the afternoon of Thursday 2 May, supported by Precisely. The topic is “Better data, better underwriting performance”. Register here.
I’m also doing an interactive webinar on "Mastering Stakeholder Engagement” on Thursday 9 May from 12-1pm London time. This is for the “Modern Data Community” so you’ll need to contact me for an invitation.
And if you can’t make those, but want to chat data anyway, then give me a shout.
Have a wonderful week,
Charles
For the full article in The Times on James Vowles and Williams F1, click here. It’s behind a paywall, but non-subscribers can register to read a few articles per month.
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