Objective: To help PepsiCo D+A secure $120m in funds for building advanced data and analytics capabilities that can be used by the global organization through internal marketing.
Deliverables: 3 White Papers
Topics:
Global Data Governance at PepsiCo
Understanding PepsiCo’s Enterprise Data Foundation
Driving tangible value through advanced analytics
PepsiCo’s Data and Analytics (D+A) unit builds AI and analytics capabilities that power digital transformation across the entire global organisation. This unit is led by the Executive Vice President of Data and Analytics at PepsiCo, who reports directly to the CTO.
The D+A unit was running an internal marketing campaign to secure over $120m in funds to advance the organisation’s data analytics maturity, and attain baseline maturity levels across all markets. This would be enabled by standardisation of data governance capabilities, building an enterprise data platform running key analytics use cases, and enabling use of curated and well-governed data.
To this end, the Data and Analytics group was creating a series of white papers to educate the board members about ongoing projects, and bring them up to speed on where the organisation currently was. They hired me to interview multiple project leads across the Data and Analytics unit, synthesise a coherent narrative by analysing multiple sharepoint sites, PowerBI dashboards, and existing data and analytics capabilities.
Each white paper took an approximate 4 weeks from ideation to completion. Because various teams were spread across time zones, asynchronous communication was crucial for getting things done. Thankfully, I had to hop on real-time video calls only three times over the course of three months.
Collaboration highlights
PepsiCo makes extensive use of Microsoft Teams and Zoom for collaboration. Onboarding was a breeze, as they make use of some automated vendor onboarding processes.
The D+A team was happy to let me use design tools of my choice, as long as they could retain the editable files. The organisation makes use of both Miro and Canva – the former worked great for doing flowcharts and diagrams quickly, especially where correctness of diagrams was of prime importance. Miro makes it possible to quickly iterate on the illustrations, although the tool isn’t traditionally used for this purpose. Canva was used sparingly, mostly for exporting icons and other minor graphic elements, as Adobe Stock assets can become expensive quickly in such projects.
Notes and learnings
Internal marketing can be useful for making investment decisions in large organisations.
I was surprised to see how disconnected senior management can grow from what goes on at the ground level in large organisations like PepsiCo. In such orgs, internal marketing can be a very useful way to make informed budgeting decisions. Moreover, text and graphics prove more versatile, because execs prefer to scroll and skim through content rather than sit through videos.
An insider perspective on how complex enterprise tech projects can become.
Since I had been writing for IT services companies that serve CPG companies, I gained an insider view of how complex data and analytics projects can become. This helped me add some more perspectives that I can bring to SME interviews. For example, how they coordinate rollouts across multiple markets. Or, how do they create transformation roadmaps, when each market is at a different maturity level with regards to a certain capability.
Making topics like data governance less boring for senior executives is not an easy job. It takes some serious (pun intended) creative effort to turn concept-heavy content into easy-to-consume infographics and illustrations.
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