Basic Essentials

05Aug08

Someone at work told me that if I were to ever feel lost or overwhelmed with the amount of information I have, I should always turn to my basics.

Plodding along the steep learning curve of being constantly exposed to new analysis tools and getting bogged down by ‘important and neccessary’ administrative/procedural work, I realise being unafraid to turn back to basics is one of best advice I’ve received.

In less than 2 months into my new job, I was definitely super fortunate to be given enough freedom to try out actual analysis, get my hands wet and even had a chance to have a splash around in pools of data. It was very instinctive for me to hastily jump into the most impressive looking tool and trying to make sophisticated insights out of it.

Delving into a pile of almost-a-hundred slides and thousands of data points without any aim or vision in mind, you can probably guess where I ended up – a whole lot of wasted work hours and not anywhere close to a tight, consolidated research story. Instead, I winded up with one too many random points scattered across one too many charts which spells incoherence with a capital ‘I’ across the pres as a whole.

I looked back upon my past projects in uni and in past competitions, albeit not as much complexity and data volume, I highly doubt my inability to produce coherent insights. The additional knowledge I’ve so quickly acquired in the past month turn out to be a total distraction from the very basic skill I have picked up from my education – “What are your objectives?” is the question.

So basic, yet it did not occur to me, which is really baffling and really induces me to give myself a good mental bashing up.

So today, I will pen down the basics, just in case they don’t occur to me again.

1. Do a quick desk research to find out latest trends, news and background about the category and market in study.
2. Have a mental idea of what recommendations were previously given to client, if any, to provide at least some continuation.
3. Framed in the client’s perspective, pen down the most pressing issues to be addressed given current trends and last quarter’s insights. If still lost – try SWOT or Porter’s 5!
4. Turn to current data and get a general holistic overview and summarise big picture.
5. Finally – the most difficult – making sense and relevance of insights in the current timeframe with the issues to be addressed.

May not be the best way, but it will do for now. Perhaps one day when I look back at this post I may realise how naive I was, and that would be really fun!

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