Using data-driven insight to enhance competitive advantage

We supported two leading UK organisation’s responsible for elite sports performance and funding to scope out how they can be better at using data driven insight to improve athlete performance. That’s down the gym, what they eat, how they train, who gets selected, the pre-competition strategy or in-game tactical decisions. It’s about winning, winning well and sustaining a competitive advantage into the Los Angeles Olympics and beyond.

The high-performance sport agency is responsible for deciding how to invest funding from The National Lottery and the Department of Culture and Media Sports (DCMS) into the UKs 40+ World Class Programmes. This covers the ca, 1,200 athletes, coaches and associated staff who make Olympic and Paralympic teams

They also fund a leading sports science and performance body, who provide specialist services to the World Class Programmes. This covers everything from Elite Training Centres, medical staff, technology, coaches, nutritionists, physios and performance analysts.

Under the current arrangements, each sport is responsible for the management of athlete performance data. They know that more can be done but need to increase capabilities to do it. With the significant growth in data sources, the gap between what could be done and is done is growing. The impact is compounded by the fact that Australia, France, Holland and Team USA, are investing heavily in this area.

Our customer does not want to be overtaken or left behind. The athlete support organisation was tasked with providing a digital transformation  proposal on how to transform the use of Athlete Performance Data across all World Class Programmes. This proposal is needed to inform the sport’s agency’s investment strategy for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Project One formed a blended team of the key national bodies supporting high-performance sport, with both Head of Performance Data and a Performance Data Lead under the sponsorship of the Director of Athlete Health and Performance Data. The customer being the Director of Performance. Our work was split into three parts to understand the current state, develop a vision for the future and propose a set of recommendations.

To inform the work the team engaged widely:

• To understand the current issues with data, what they could do if resolved, and ideas for the future. We engaged with 10 different sports ranging from Cycling, Para powerlifting, Curling, sailing, triathlon and archery
• To see how things are done elsewhere – we consulted with the Boston Celtics basketball club, visited the English Cricket Board and Arsenal Football Club
• And the Project One digital community shared lessons and case studies on overcoming the ‘transformation dragons’ and how to make digital transformation a success.

Our work on the current state quantified issues with siloed approaches, high effort and low reward data management activity, with inconsistent and unsustainable digital solutions. It also highlighted strengths such as a willingness to invest, a nascent central data team, examples of excellent digital solutions and a recognition that working as a collective has huge potential.

The vision is… Meaningful insight made easy…

• Meaningful – improves our understanding of performance
• Easy – timely, informed decision making by making insight easy to access

The supporting recommendations for the digital transformation were to:

• Establish a Digital Services Unit that provides a centre of excellence for analytics, insight and digital tools
• Scale the digital backbone to provide common infrastructure as a managed service to all World Class Programmes and the two leading organisations responsible for elite sports performance and funding
• Evolve support to World Class Programmes to use those tools to create meaningful insight
• Elevate data as a strategic priority by ensuring there is system-wide leadership, governance and change management in place.

The outcome for the government-supported elite athlete organisation was a compelling proposal to inform the sport agency’s investment decisions for the LA cycle. Specifically:

• A clearly documented case for change, vision, target state, roadmap and costings to inform the LA investment strategy
• Senior leadership bought into changing
• Support from the sports to do things differently
• Confidence that what is being proposed is the right thing, realistic and achievable (Everything proposed is technically possible and being done elsewhere already).

Project One value Add:

• Working with multiple stakeholders to bring clarity to a complex topic, by working with many stakeholders to agree align with a common vision, benefits and roadmap
• Providing independent, vendor agnostic advice, on how to avoid common pitfalls and set a digital transformation up for success.