Kill the Waste (The Lean Analytics Playbook)

Walk through your analytics "factory" and look for waste. Dashboards nobody opens—waste. Reports that take 3 days to generate when users only need it monthly—waste. Analysts spending 60% of their time on manual data pulls instead of analysis—waste. Pipelines breaking weekly because they're brittle—waste. Meetings where no decisions get made—waste. Teams rebuilding the same analysis because they don't know someone already did it—waste. Most analytics teams operate with 50-70% waste and just accept it as "the cost of doing business." But waste isn't neutral—it's expensive. It burns budget, crushes morale, and prevents you from doing high-value work. Every hour spent on waste is an hour not spent on innovation.