The AF Framework: scoping an analytics function in nine steps

How it’s structured

The framework works through nine areas, arranged around a shared operating model at the centre. At each end sit the two anchors that keep the rest honest: vision and strategy first, so the scope is grounded in an actual mandate, and business case and value realisation last, so nothing gets scoped without a clear return in mind.

In between, the remaining seven areas split into two groups. Sourcing, technology and tooling, and performance measurement cover the practical building blocks: where capability comes from, what it runs on, and how success gets tracked. Process definition, skills and capabilities, organisation and governance, and change management cover the harder, people-facing work of making an analytics function actually function, day to day, across an organisation rather than inside a single team.

Working through all nine in a fixed order takes a fraction of the time a traditional maturity assessment does, because it forces the same structured conversation every time instead of starting from a blank page.

Where we use it

We bring the AF Framework into Drive for Clarity engagements, usually in the first working sessions with a client’s leadership team. It gives everyone in the room the same map to point at, which makes disagreements about priority a lot easier to have out loud instead of in separate meetings afterward.

It isn’t a deliverable we sell on its own. It’s one of several structured tools our team carries into an engagement to move faster from a vague ambition to a scoped, sequenced piece of work, the same way we’d bring domain expertise or a technical accelerator. Like everything else on this page, it exists to get to a decision faster, not to replace the judgement that has to sit behind it.