“The Golden Rule of Habit Change:
You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”
Charles
Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
I
recently read the following article, Aviate, Navigate,
Communicate: Business Crisis Management From a Pilots Perspective. It struck an accord because
in another life time, I was a young Student Naval Flight Officer in the U.S.
Navy. The phrase, Aviate, Navigate, Communicate, is a habit drummed into
aviators to utilize when an emergency happens in the air. It represents the
basic activities needed to keep one alive while troubleshooting an issue. It’s
a habit that requires actions and no thoughts to follow.
“Aviate,
Navigate, Communicate” led me to devise “Question, Investigate, Communicate”
for my profession in analytics.
Question
At
the very minimum, an analyst needs to understand the business problem. Some
call it requirements gathering, writing specifications, or just plainly “what’s
the question?”
I
like to ask the following questions:
- What’s the issue/problem?
- Who else needs to see this info?
- Where do you plan to use this information? Meeting room? Smart phone?
- What does the final output look like?
- When is it needed?
- How do you (business user) plan to use this info?
If
the above questions look similar a journalist’s “the 5 W’s” then you’d be right. I often imagine that I’m a journalist
when I’m first presented with an issue or request. I treat each request with a
healthy dose of skepticism.
Investigate
Now
that I know what the core problem is, I need to develop options or possible
solutions.
Investigation
can take on several forms such as:
- Data extraction from databases to produce a data report
- ad-hoc querying against corporate data-sets to satisfy a “what if” question
- Descriptive statistics applied to a data-set to understand
- Data Visualizations in the form of charts and maps
- A data model created to describe a population with embedded business logic
- Facilitation or Negotiation with varying parties to arrive at a set of options
I like this quote from Rahm Emanuel, “Don’t come in here and dump a problem. I have a whole desk full of
those. Bring a set of solutions.” That is analysis. It attempts to distill
a problem to core components and offers various thoughts on how to describe or
solve the problem
Communicate
No
matter how brilliant a piece of analysis is, without communicating the results
to the right person at the right time then analysis isn’t complete.
Communication is actually the cornerstone to great analysis. Think about it,
the task of analysis is to dissect key facts from vast amounts of information
and transform it into useful “bit-size and flavorful” bites.
Communicating
results can take on many forms:
- report/dashboard
- excel model
- e-mail/memo
- presentation in a meeting
- phone call/Face-to-face interaction
No
matter the form, one must be mindful to how much or how little information to
give to the business user.
When
the stress level is high and time is short, remember to “Question, Analyze, and
Communicate”
