Your should ground your adoption project in data. You’ll need to reference, analyze, and collect data throughout the life of the project. Data is especially important to your root cause analysis. Jurisdictions should use adoption timeliness data and adaptive and technical challenge data (Module 1) to conduct a root cause analysis of adoption issues.

Look for:

• (a)    Data trends,
• (b)    Numbers that stand out (positive or negative),
• (c)    Variations across time
• (d)    Variations across geography
• (e)    Any other patterns or anomalies

Use the adoption timeliness measures to identify (i) places that might need some work, and (ii) places that seem to be excelling. Both are important. Knowing what is going on in jurisdictions that are doing well with adoption is as important as identifying poor performance because you may be able to transfer, adapt, or replicate the processes that are working to the places where things are not going well. Once you've identified an issue, dig deeper into it by looking at additional data until you feel like you have enough information to act. There is no bright line rule as to when you have enough data. You're looking for a picture of the problem that is "good enough" to move forward on, not a perfect picture free of “data gaps.” That's impossible. Data is actionable when you have enough of it to draw reasonable inferences about the root causes of an issue.