Discover our new Ebook: 5 Essential Building Blocks for your Competitive Intelligence Project

At Digimind we’re always looking for ways to help alleviate your Competitive Intelligence conundrums. This easy read, step-by-step guide focuses on tips and techniques to avoid CI project drawbacks by following the 5 phases of a Competitive Intelligence project.

Any project should begin with defined goals and strategies. Your CI project in particular should be specific to the strategic and operational goals of your organisation. If you miss or inadequately perform steps in the first stage, it will inevitably affect the remaining lifespan and success of your project.

Creating a successful project involves collecting the right information across an extended period of time. What you collect is what enables you to spot visible patterns and trends, from which you will create and deliver actionable insights to the key decisions makers in your organisation.

In this free handbook “The 5 Essential Building Blocks”, discover how to: 

• Map your project and define success
• Set your goals and consider sources
• Select and display information
• Deliver your analysis to different audiences
• Choose the right champions in your team

Map and define success

We segmented a CI project into 5 stages to clearly identify every step of the process. To effectively map your project there are areas to define before take off: topics, objectives, resources and audiences. We also created a list of potential factors to take into consideration when creating your inventory.

Consider all potential sources

Take the time to consider all of the usual and irregular sources you could be monitoring. If you are in a team, be sure to encourage and utilise all individual networks and experiences. Stress the importance of sharing any insights, trends and feedback from personal and professional networks.

Be selective

Understand that an abundance of information is not key to creating actionable insights. The aim is to select what is relevant and valuable to your organisation. Just like the 5 phases of this ebook, you should segment information into various categories to aid your analysis and begin identifying patterns.

Deliver your analysis

No two deliverables should be the same. In this chapter you will discover the many variations you should be considering when creating and sharing deliverables. Consider your audiences and base your deliverables on the profile of the user.

Pick your champions

The only thing more important than the set up of your project are the people helping to implement it. We believe a team should be made up of 4 distinct roles and responsibilities to carry a project to success. This includes the right project manager, who can truly deliver the benefits of a CI project and its results to key decision makers.