INFORMS Student Chapter Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences

Shaun Doheney is a Principal Analytics Leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he leads a global business operations technology team, and was previously the Chief Analytics Officer for an Inc. 5000 small business.  He holds a BS in Mathematics from California State University, Long Beach; an MS in Operations Analysis from the Naval Postgraduate School; and a Graduate Certificate in Data Analytics from George Mason University.  He is an INFORMS Certified Analytics Professional (CAP®), Analytics Capability Evaluation (ACE) Coach, AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty, and a Project Management Professional (PMP®).  Prior to his current civilian employment, Shaun served over 20 years as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, which included operations research assignments where he performed quantitative analyses and evaluations across major Department of Defense decision support processes and defense systems acquisition programs while guiding the adoption of analytic methods involving uncertainty associated with risk and readiness. His past defense-related projects included optimizing allocation of resources across operational scenarios to inform portfolio funding decisions over a multiyear horizon.  Shaun continues to give back to the Operations Research and Analytics communities as the President of the INFORMS Military and Security Society, teaching the Certified Analytics Professional Exam Preparation Course, and volunteering at ProbabilityManagement.org – a nonprofit dedicated to making uncertainty actionable through education, best practices, and open standards and tools.

Title:  Project Phoenix: The Critical Skills to Rise from the Ashes of a Doomed Research Project

Abstract:  In 2018, Gartner made a widely shared prediction that 85% of Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects would eventually fail.  While many organizations are reaping the benefits of successful AI and analytics implementations, the reality is that many analysts and industry leaders continue to make similar predictions today noting that their AI and analytics projects continue to under-deliver and are considered failures.  These failures and challenges have been attributed to reasons such as lack of a cohesive AI and analytics strategy, application of AI and analytics to the wrong projects, poor organizational alignments, and lack of continued C-suite commitments.  In this talk, we will discuss another cause of failure – when key stakeholders want your project to fail. Changing some of the names to protect the guilty, we’ll review a real-world defense-related research project on the path to demise and the critical skills needed to ultimately deliver a successful outcome.  We’ll explore skills – both at the interpersonal and organizational levels – that are critical in shaping the success of analytics projects and analytics functions within an organization.  The key to success is analytics professionals and researchers who know how to communicate up, down, and across stakeholders while employing active listening, tactical empathy, and calibrated questions to achieve stakeholder alignment throughout the analytics process.  Learn from the pitfalls faced by others and the lessons they’ve learned to ensure that your research project beats the odds and is considered a success.

Join us for Research Bits and Bites: an event centered around sharing our research interests over bubble tea! In addition to tasty drinks and learning more about each others' research, we'll also share some tips and tricks for honing our academic elevator pitches in preparation for conferences, interviews, and any other networking opportunities.