Analysing a company performance as a Poet or as a Writer

by Richard Fontaine Wevalgo founder

I 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 1^st 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?