The New How: Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy by Nilofer Merchant

Author:Nilofer Merchant
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Business Communication / General
ISBN: 9781491903384
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Published: 2014-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

RESEARCHING: GATHERING DATA YOU CAN REFERENCE.

Quantitative, hard numbers from reports and databases are an important part of the Question phase, but use them with care. The ubiquity of computers and vastness of the Internet mean that quantitative information is everywhere, and much of it is free and of dubious quality. Still, numbers can be a gold mine, as long as you know how to interpret the data.

The first step in knowing how to interpret your information is knowing where it came from. If you identify that the 2008 consumer software total available market (TAM) was $X zillion, it matters where that data point was found. Were the numbers from a 2009 study? Or from a 2007 projection? You may need to revisit the source of a “fact” in order to evaluate the assumptions and vocabulary of the source. Keeping track of your information sources also increases the credibility of facts in discussions down the road.

Beyond the source, try to get perspectives on the validity of the data. If you gained access to databases or reports during your interviews, hopefully you also got some sense of the accuracy and reliability of that data. For external or web-sourced content, see whether you can find other people in your company (or externally) who can attest to its usefulness.

Finally, check that your team has some data analysis skills. If they don’t, borrow someone with those skills. Two particular skills will be useful. First, if you have raw data, it will be very important to have someone with the ability to slice-and-dice numbers in search of insights. Second, you need someone who can “see through” and comment on conclusions drawn from statistics, particularly on information from polling data. For example, was there a sampling bias? Did the wording of the question make it impossible to answer accurately? What did the analyst mean by “open systems”? The skills of an insightful number cruncher can be very useful in this phase.

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