7P13SR- ONE- SHEET3
Sa1_Jyyy
Workshop5.Analysisandfindings.pptxMN7P13 Building Business Insights Workshop 5: Analysis and findings
Dr. Stephen Hills
Analysis and findings
The seven-steps process
How do you define a problem in a precise way to meet the decision maker’s needs?
How do you disaggregate the issues and develop hypotheses to be explored?
How do you prioritize what to do and what not to do?
How do you develop a workplan and assign analytical tasks?
How do you decide on the fact gathering and analysis to resolve the issues, while avoiding cognitive biases?
How do you go about synthesizing the findings to highlight insights?
How do you communicate them in a compelling way?
Step 5: Conduct critical analyses
5. Analysis and findings (30%, 2,400 words)
Commence by presenting your ‘one day solution’ on the basis of your understanding ahead of your analysis, summarising the situation that prevails at the start of your project, the complication (i.e., what changed or what went wrong) and your current understanding of a resolution.
The situation and complication may have evolved from original definition of the problem.
Summarise what insights are still required to reach a solution, so to justify the forthcoming analysis.
Sequentially working through each of your research questions, present the analysis you undertook and the findings. Wherever possible, visually present your findings (e.g., graphs, infographics).
For each research question, clearly state the insights that have been gained.
NB: It is not required that you will need to undertake primary data collection (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups) or highly sophisticated analysis (e.g., regression modelling, thematic analysis), but you may feel these methods are critical to solve your problem. If so, discuss with your supervisor ahead of commencing such work.
Commence by presenting your ‘one day solution’ on the basis of your understanding ahead of your analysis, summarising the situation that prevails at the start of your project, the complication (i.e., what changed or what went wrong) and your current understanding of a resolution. The situation and complication may have evolved from original definition of the problem. Summarise what insights are still required to reach a solution, so to justify the forthcoming analysis.
One-day answers
Crisp and concise.
Stating what you know about your problem at any point in the process helps to clarify:
What understandings are emerging.
What unknowns still stand between the answers and us.
One-day answers convey our current best analysis of the situation, complications or insightful observations and our best guess at the solutions, as we iterate between our evolving workplans and our analysis.
This helps us to divert resources to areas where we have the biggest gaps in problem solving and shut down analysis that is not taking us anywhere.
As analysis findings come in, we can refine our one-day answers and begin to synthesize our evidence into more complete stories.
Structuring one-day answers
Situation: A short description of the situation that prevails at the outset of problem solving. The state of affairs that sets up the problem.
Observation or complication: A set of observations or complications around the situation that creates the tension or dynamic that captures the problem. What changed or what went wrong that created the problem.
Implication or resolution: The best idea of the implication or resolution of the problem that you have right now. At the beginning this will be rough and speculative. Later it will be a more and more refined idea that answers the question “What should we do?”
One-day answers: What they are not
Case: Hardware company one-day answer
Case: Hardware company one-day answer
Situation: Herchinger is a dominant player with a long and successful history in one region and seeks to expand.
Observation or complication: A new competitor, Home Depot, has emerged with a warehouse superstore model that is growing faster due to lower pricing made possible by sourcing economies of scale, lower cost logistics and higher asset productivity.
Implication or resolution: To remain competitive via lower pricing Herchinger needs to quickly reform its inventory management and logistics systems and to develop lower-cost sourcing models.
Sequentially working through each of your research questions, present the analysis you undertook and the findings. Wherever possible, visually present your findings (e.g., graphs, infographics). For each research question, clearly state the insights that have been gained.
Simple analysis
Good problem solvers have a toolkit for fact gathering and analysis.
Starting with rules of thumb, summary statistics and heuristics to understand the direction and magnitudes of relationships.
We can structure and resolve many analytic issues with rules of thumb, summary statistics and straightforward heuristics.
Rules of thumb are shortcuts in analysis that we can quickly apply to answer a question.
Summary statistics are calculations that provide a summary of data, e.g. Mean average.
Heuristics are any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation.
All three help to size the different elements of the problem to determine the critical and efficient path in further analysis.
Simple analysis
Start all analytic work with summary statistics and heuristics that help you see the size and shape of your problem levers.
Rules of thumb can serve as useful short cuts.
Simple question-based analysis grounded in the literature can lead you to a solution.
Root cause and 5-Ways can help you identify fundamental causes of problems that then lead to a solutuion.
Sophisticated analysis
You may be faced with a complex problem that really does require a robustly quantified solution:
Have you adequately framed the problem you face, and the hypothesis you want to test, so that it’s clear you do need more firepower?
Is there data available to support using an advanced analytic tool?
Which tool is the right one for your problem?
Is there user-friendly software available to help you use some of these tools?
Sophisticated analysis
RCTs are the gold standard for determining cause and effect, but where these are not possible you might be able to use a natural experiment or model causes using regression.
Regression can also be used to predict an outcome by constructing a model with observed data and inputting hypothetical data.
Game theory encourages you to think through different scenarios depending on the move of a competitor.
Bayesian statistics calculate probability of something under different conditions.
Conclusions
Conclusions
One day answers clarify where you are and what work is left to do.
Start all analytic work with summary statistics and heuristics that help you see the size and shape of your problem levers.
To get to a solution for many complex problems may require sophisticated analytic tools.
To do this you need to understand your research question and the nature of your data.
