Analysing a company performance as a Poet or as a Writer
by Richard Fontaine Wevalgo founderI suppose that many would agree that delivering quantified
analysis is very powerful because it is factual, easy to remember, easy to
compare, gives credibility…
That may be done easily for many studies: operational data
crunching (productivity, quality, financials…), time studies, practice maturity
evaluation (e.g. CMMI)
But what about studies where there is a lot of ‘open text
questions’ with no (or you don’t have) predefined scoring ‘model’ in particular
the client interviews, though this applies to other type of analysis such as
root cause analysis and problem solving workshop…
I believe that as a Poet who builds some aesthetic and
rhythm with text, the Operations Analyst can build quantified analysis with
text results to make his results more memorable and impactful.
Let’s take two examples:
How to present the results of interviews about strengths and
weaknesses with 10 people?
Lots of text, some are similar, many are different…With a qualitative
presentation, you never get it right
because either you just show some examples and it is not representative, or you
show them all and it is a mess. What do people remember.
If you spend the time to categorise the answers by
similarities, then you can both present a quantified graph clearly showing the
priorities and a few of the quotes, linked to the highest priorities.
Have you faced this
situation?
You ask two persons what they think of a specific practice,
process…
The 1st one says “we have a lot of issues here”
and then he lists many issues, giving details and so on. Then you ask him to
score the performance for this practice from 0 to 10? Of course, given all the
issues he mentioned you expect a 2 or 3 maximum… But he gives 8/10!! What? He
justifies it though the issues he could tell, overall it is a good
performance!!
And guess what, the second one doesn’t find any issue, and
even tells you that it is ok, but gives a score of 2 or 3…because it is ok for
now, given the context, but overall he could be much better!
So again, the quantification brings much more perspective to
the “free text” and helps better understanding of the situation.
If you don’t have quantified results, another trick I have
used is to give some colour code (red, amber green) to present and compare
several “qualitative” results.
Overall you can’t abuse too much of these techniques, but a
good balance of quantified graphs or coloured tables with open text gives a
more vivid, interesting and memorable presentation; and it increases your
credibility.
Of course, this means much more preparation for your
interviews, by building the right questionnaire, that may contain a lot of
knowledge and expertise on the topic of the interview; it must have the right
questions, in right number with the right amount of qualitative vs
quantitative. And then you must be able to consolidate the answers, analyse the
quantitative results and compare the qualitative; then you must build the
graphs….
But, when you do, I believe that also demonstrate much more
that you are an expert, being able to articulate your expertise with your
clients. In addition you may also be able to use benchmarks. That puts you into
a new level of excellence, with much better value for your clients.
So are you more a poet or a writer? Do you have examples where
it was useful?
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Created on Aug 9th 2019 14:04. Viewed 312 times.