How Formula 1 pitstop teams inspired the codification of our ways of working

The Protocol Series — Our first episode explores the concept of a protocol and explores how Formula 1 pitstop teams inspired QuantumBlack in scaling advanced analytics.

Over the past five years, QuantumBlack has evolved as we have experienced an accelerated period of growth. From 30 employees in our small office near the Barbican in London, we have surged to over 450 employees spread across 11 offices globally. But with growth comes growing pains. As we started to scale, we witnessed our ways of working begin to fragment.

Compounding this challenge was the constantly evolving landscape of data science and advanced analytics. With new methods, approaches and technology emerging on a seemingly weekly basis, it can be difficult for any organisation adopting AI to keep track of what’s most likely to drive impact and performance.

In the face of this constantly changing landscape, QuantumBlack has developed a library of organisational protocols and a flexible framework that informs the way we deliver advanced analytics at scale. We appreciate that many organisations continue to grapple with an advanced analytics landscape in a constant state of change, and so thought it may be useful to share our own experiences in building and incorporating these protocols across a series of videos. Our first episode can be found below and explores the concept of a protocol and how QuantumBlack’s journey of continual improvement was inspired by Formula 1 pitstop teams.

This entire journey has been a truly collaborative effort — with over 250 contributions from data engineers, data scientists, designers, projects managers and analytics experts — totalling over 150,000 words of best practice. Much of which, is now enabled by bespoke technology designed to accelerate our projects and improve the overall experience for teams and stakeholders.

Over the course of this series we’ll discuss how we created this learning system at QuantumBlack, the experiences that inspired its creation, our approach to driving its adoption at scale and the benefits that can be reaped from consistent ways of working. You can watch our first episode below.

Scaling Advance Analytics With Organisational Protocols

Please do look out for future updates in this series — our next episode will take a detailed look at our 5i framework for delivering analytics, which helps articulate the end-to-end lifecycle of an advanced analytics use case.

James Mulligan — Principal Product Manager, QuantumBlack