Essential Practice Skills for High-Impact Analytics Projects

What You Will Learn

Participants will learn practical tools for integrating their analytical skills into real-world problem solving for businesses and other organizations. The course provides approaches that can be applied immediately to a wide variety of settings, whether within a participant's own organization or for an external client.

By the end of the course, participants will:

• Learn to link their subject-matter expertise to the challenges of messy, unstructured problems, organizational noise, and non-technical decision makers.
• Understand best-practice techniques, including: problem statement summaries, issue trees, interview guides, work plans, sensitivity analysis, stress-testing recommendations, the "Pyramid Principle" of story logic, story-boarding, slide-craft, delivering presentations, and fielding Q&A. 

Course Outline

Day One: From Issues to Work

I. Defining the Problem

• Interviewing the clients
• Identifying the need for change
• Framing the key question
• Determining project scope
• Surfacing the stakeholders' criteria for quality...and action

II. Structuring the Problem

• Smart decomposition of complex problems
• Creating issue trees
• Applying the "80/20 rule"

III. Planning the Work

• Tying issue trees to work product
• Selecting the appropriate analyses
• Identifying information needs
• Creating manageable work plans
• Setting work priorities

IV. Working the Plan

• Managing complex work plans
• Dealing with the dynamics of work groups and teams
• Navigating client interactions
• Bridging the gap between desired and available data
• Making sense of messy, real-world data
• Developing practical assumptions and approximations
• Avoiding "analysis paralysis": Deciding when "enough is enough"

Day Two: From Insights to Action

V. Developing Insights and Recommendations

• Validating and verifying results
• Testing sensitivity to assumptions
• Asking "so what?": Moving from data to insights to recommendations to plans
• "Stress-testing" recommendations

VI. Making the Case

• Analyzing the levers of persuasion
• Selecting the appropriate vehicles and media for communication
• Refining the argument structure: "The Pyramid Principle"
• Using story boards to develop a strong story line
• Crafting slides that support the story
• Presenting results based on complex analytical work

VII. Create Value through Action

• Driving organizational change
• Quantifying impact of project
• Celebrating success
• Following-up and maintaining client relationships
• Setting up the next project