Scribd
Upload
45 views

Asking The Right Questions

The document discusses the importance of communication skills for business analysts and data visualization projects. It provides research showing that communication skills are the most important for getting jobs in business analysis. Additionally, it cites research finding that 99% of companies said organizational issues like communication were the main reasons for big data project failures, rather than technical issues.

Uploaded by

Ghulam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
45 views

Asking The Right Questions

The document discusses the importance of communication skills for business analysts and data visualization projects. It provides research showing that communication skills are the most important for getting jobs in business analysis. Additionally, it cites research finding that 99% of companies said organizational issues like communication were the main reasons for big data project failures, rather than technical issues.

Uploaded by

Ghulam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

We put data visualization first and data

communication second in this course title. Because that's the order in which
you do things when you're in a data analysis project and you've
already started doing your analysis. But our title leaves out a critical step, the
communication that happens
before you even touch your data. Academic researchers and the Teradata
University Network ran a study to determine the state of business
intelligence and analytics. They asked over 400 recruiters from
technical companies to respond to the following prompt. When I recruit for business
intelligence
or business analysts roles, it is important that the students have
the following course work or knowledge. Then the recruiters had to rank
a bunch of possible responses. The number one answer
companies gave in this survey was communication skills,
believe it or not. Communication skills was
then followed by SQL and query skills and then basic analytics. So according to
this data, communication
skills are even more important than technical or quantitative analysis skills
for getting a business analysis job. Another piece of research proving
how important communication is for business analysts comes from
the data analytics company Gartner. They ran a research study to
determine why big data projects fail. They wanted to know what percentage
of big data projects fail due to organizational problems,
including communication, and what percentage fail due
to technical problems. In the chart to my right, in the column all the way at the
edge
with the pie chart that is 100% blue, you can see the percent of companies who
responded that 100% of the reasons that their data analytics projects failed
were related to organizational issues. In the column next to that with
the pie chart that is 75% blue, you can see the percent of companies who
responded that most of the reasons their data analytics projects
failed were organizational. The column next to that shows you the
percent of companies who responded that half or some of their reasons their
data analytics projects failed were organizational issues. And the column all the
way on the other
edge shows you the percent of companies that responded that most of the reasons
the data analytics projects failed were due to technical issues. You'll notice
there's only 1% in that bar. So as you can see, 99% of companies
said that at least half of the reasons their data analytics projects failed
were due to poor organizational skills, not technical skills. Isn't that amazing?
Now, of course, one of the most important organizational
skills is the ability to communicate. The ability to communicate the value
of the analysis you're working on, but also the ability to talk to and understand
the people who will
be influenced by your project. Those people who are influence by your
project are called your stakeholders. [COUGH] Stakeholders, get it? Steak, holder,
I was very proud of that joke. Data interpretations are fundamentally
influenced by their context. Part of the context is
driven by your stakeholders. But an equally influential part of the
context is driven by you as the analyst, your assumptions, your hypotheses,
and what you already know. A successful analyst needs to
learn how to anticipate issues in both the context created
by the stakeholders and the context created by you, your own
knowledge and your biases as an analyst. In this module I want to show you that one
way to ensure your data's project context works for you rather than against you,
is to ask and then answer a series of
logically thought out and connected questions about first
the project and second the data. Some people call these connected
questions a framework. Other people might call
them the right questions. There's a lot of mystique about asking
the right question in business analysis. This mystique makes it sound like one
right question will suddenly make a perfect answer fall out
of the sky to your feet. That sounds very nice, it really does. But real life and
real data are much more messy than that. First of all you will never know if one
question is the right question until you actually have an answer. And second of all
very rarely does
one question answer your entire business problem. Further, the right question
can come in many flavors. Sometimes the right question is the one
that solves your business problem. But other times the right question is the
one that prevents you from misinterpreting your data or from recommending a
business
process change that has no chance of being adopted by your stakeholders. Therefore,
I think it's misleading to
talk about asking the right question, because there are lots of right questions. So
instead of worrying about
asking the right question, I want you to focus on
asking a lot of questions. Be really, really curious all the time. Be insatiable in
your desire
to understand the ins and outs of every business
situation you encounter. Be a sponge and soak up as much
information as you possibly can in the time your project allows. Your job is to be
a detective and identify all the things that can
either solve you business problem, affect your data interpretation, or
influence your eventual recommendation. The best way to make sure you eventually
cover the right question is to ask and answer as many questions
as you can come up with. In this module, we are going to
go over some of the key questions you should make sure to ask
before you even touch any data. We're also going to go over ways
you can organize your questions, so that you can navigate the problem space of
your data analytics project as efficiently as possible. My goal is that by the end
of this module
you will feel confident that you can organize a deliberately chosen set of
questions to cover all the content you need to in a very short amount of time. Are
you ready to ask some questions?

You might also like