The seven habits of analyst rock stars!

Implement and practice these seven habits to make your work relevant, timely and actionable for the business and your customers!

1. Collect, discuss and understand  the questions that matter for your customers and business owners.   Working with the business, determine how valuable the various questions are and whether they can be acted upon.   How much time should be spent on this work?   Is it better to take a simple approach and deliver a rapid answer and then revisit it more in-depth?   Remember that the first step is the most important step! If you don’t actively engage in this step, you will lose a lot of your time and opportunity to positively impact the business.
2. Collect and clean the best available data for the identified questions. Implement a strategy to capture and enrich the analytic data used across multiple projects.
3. Explore the data sources to understand high level trends and exceptions. Leverage rapid graphs and simpler analytic methods here…
4. Understand key interactions, trends, sources of effect & possible causes. Use clear graphs in a simple, short presentation to explain key findings for business owners.
5. Communicate the right amount of information and conclusions in the language of the audience. What matters to them@f7   Don’t be afraid to make recommendations based on your work!   Don’t be offended if they don’t follow all of your recommendations, there are many factors beyond your findings that will affect what is implemented.   When creating your presentation, apply the 10/20/30 rule of Guy Kawasaki- no more than 10 slides in 20 minutes and no text smaller than 30 point font!
6. Collaborate with the business to act on the findings. Seek long-term business opportunities to seamlessly integrate analytics.
7. Continue to learn from and listen to the business!   The more you listen to the business the more they will listen to you!

As you practice these habits, especially step 1, you will eliminate one of the biggest complaints I hear from analysts- that their work isn’t appreciated or understood often enough in the business.  Step 1 is about active listening, understanding context of problems and prioritization.   Unfortunately, most analysts and statistical experts have never received any training in this area!

At Freakalytics, we are pleased to offer custom training for your technical and analytic teams.   Using a series of short workshops, we can coach your team to better understand, practice and gain confidence in applying these habits.   Please contact us for more details.