1

Abt AssociatesCompeting in a Data-driven World

The New era for research & consulting is coming. The advent of the analytics era demands that individuals and firms alike either lean in or lose out.

2

Abt AssociatesAt a glance

IndustryProfessional, research, and management consulting services

Revenue$562M revenues

HeadquartersMassachusetts, United States

Founded1963

Company BioAbt Associates is a global leader in research, evaluation and program implementation; driving innovation and measurable impact for more than 50 years. Their focus is on using evidence and cutting-edge methods to improve the lives and economic well-being of people worldwide.

2

www.datasociety.com2020, Abt Associates

3

The Challenge

Building new skills to bid on new business

As is the case for most firms, the challenge facing Abt related to data science was not abstract or hypothetical. Abt was awash in text data and survey statistics, and managers across the organization reported needing “more staff who can carry out machine learning tasks,” as well as the ability to “provide clients with a better understanding of their survey data.” Too many Abt employees processed data manually by Excel, which limited processing speed, precluded exploratory analysis, and restricted their work to “mostly tackling smaller datasets.”

Abt missed opportunities within an exploding subset of private and public-sector projects: data-heavy analysis and data-driven strategy. Abt could not engage as many of its staff as it wanted to on the types of interesting projects that made them feel fulfilled in their jobs, dampening their employee retention and hamstringing their talent development. Both of these factors had the potential to suppress Abt’s profits and growth in the years to come.

Given the upside-down labor market for data science talent, Abt faced a difficult problem shared by many firms today: hiring data scientists on the job market is expensive and new hires are typically unequipped with the domain knowledge and company experience that would make them efficient employees. But by training up internal staff, Abt Associates can empower their staff with new dataskills built on their existing expertise. Designing and delivering an internal data science training program is outside of Abt’s core competency, not to mention that it is difficult for any internal team to carve out the time and talent to take on such a project.

It’s not enough to worry about speed and cost—to solve problems with data, you need to know how to collect, compute and share it in ways that provide genuine insight and move people to action.”

-- Michael W. Link, Ph.D., Division VP at Abt Associates

www.datasociety.com2020, Abt Associates

4

Our approach

Focusing on powerful solutions

Data Society worked with Abt to identify key areas to focus on for the Data Science Fellowshipprogram and prerequisites for success. Abt identified individuals among their staff who were best-suited to upskill in data science to participate in the program and build out capstone projects that consisted of practical applications of data analytics to current challenges at Abt.

This 4-week program taught Abt fellows how to program proficiently in Python and apply data wrangling skills to build unsupervised and supervised machine learning models to text data.

By the end of this workshop, students were able to:• Mine data to find latent patterns and

groups in different types of data• Build recommender systems• Build powerful predictive models• Develop a framework for analyzing

data to improve processes and accuracy

www.datasociety.com2020, Abt Associates

A cascading effect

The Abt Data Science Fellowship program created a groundswell of interest among employees who wanted to build their skills and do so for the benefit of their current teams at Abt. Not only did the Fellows build out their skills, but they also built out their organizational network and returned to their team with insghts about the challenge that they were working on during the program. Abtstaff members – including those both with and without technical backgrounds –were eager to make the most of the data science learning opportunity and apply the skills to drive bottom-line growth for the firm.

Fellows at Abt already familiar with Python and foundational statistics were taught more advanced skills to upskills their existing abilities over a 4-week period.

Fellows focused on clustering analyses to find patterns in data and to build classification models to forecast events and human behavior. They were also taught to select and tune classification models to enhance their research and deliver additional value to clients.

Text mining and natural language processing

Forecasting behavior with classification models

The resultAbt and Data Society ultimately created a cohort of Abt Fellows that represented all four divisions of the company in health, social and environmental policy, and international development. The AbtData Science Fellowship program trained up internal staff on their acumen in Python and upskilled them in Python, data visualization, and text mining. Not only did Fellows increase their proficiency in Python by 117%, but their ability to perform visualizations of their analyses in Python went up by 177%. Further, they saw impressive capstone projects open up lines of business not previously available to Abt Associates due to new in-house data skills such as text mining.

117% 177% 251%Data processing in Python Data visualizations in Python Text mining

A more data driven approach to business development

The success of these programs goes beyond numbers. Abt found that they could leverage data science skills and data science language in their proposals to clients to win new projects and expand scope withcurrent clients. Without question, the work that came into the firm as a result of the skills gleaned from the training increased almost immediately.

Abt also found that they were able to offer more in their ongoing projects with current clients as well as win proposals that included machine learning, predictive analytics, text mining, and neuro-linguistic programming. Ultimately, when Fellows who underwent Python training worked on writing proposals, they won business. Project officers have even insisted on bidding on more machine learning work because of the acumen of their Fellows.

Outside of the increased work avenues, Abt Fellows have created over 50 data science applications to tackle current challenges within the organization and continue to integrate data best practices across their teams.

www.datasociety.com2020, Abt Associates

Data Society is a D.C.-based analytics training & consulting firm that provides data science training to executives and data scientists to eliminate communication gaps, improve data quality, and

increase efficiencies through data-driven decision-making.

DUNS Number: 079817046 | CAGE Code: 82C08 | SAM-Registered WOSB