You are a BI analyst, and you work with different departments in your organization. I am sure that your manager has established a workflow and best practices for working with stakeholders, yet in reality, things can go quite differently. What do I mean by that?
Some scenarios
Your manager has been invited to a meeting where they find themselves collecting requirements for an analysis the business needs help with. Then, they pass the requirements to you, and you are expected to perform an analysis to answer specific business questions.
Or you were in a 15-minute kickoff meeting, where the stakeholders discuss what they think they want, and they give you the data. You are then expected to build something by the end of the day or week.
Or stakeholders simply provide you with some data and say, “Please see what you can find here. I expect something by the end of the day or week.”
These are some of the scenarios you might find yourself in. Here is how you can demonstrate your leadership skills and turn things around.
7 Steps to embed in your work
- Clarify the Context. Understanding is key. You need to understand what the stakeholder is trying to accomplish and why they are engaging you in the first place. What are they trying to solve?
- Set Expectations. This is very important. Communicate with the stakeholder, ask how they like to work, how they prefer to communicate, and explain how you also like to work. Also, when do they need this by? Set expectations for this, too. Is it achievable? For example, I explain that I like to work iteratively and keep an open line of communication. I also like to summarize at the end of a meeting what I understood from the conversation and what the next steps will be. Then I send a written recap via email to make sure we are on the same page. For the deadline, set a target together with the stakeholder, and let them know ASAP if something changes.
- Do Your Research. Once you have clarified why they need your help and what they are trying to accomplish, take a step back and do your research. Even if you are an expert in your field, it is always good to go a little deeper and improve what you already know. Talk with other people, use Google to find information, and write down any additional questions or anything useful you find.
- Iteration and Communication. Being efficient is important, and I find from my experience that working iteratively helps a lot. Sometimes I like to present a sketch on paper or an unpolished version of my analysis. Keeping an open line of communication while working iteratively with the stakeholders really saves a lot of time.
- Go Beyond the Requirements. If you have done your research, spoken with many people, and understood the problem well, you might be able to deliver more than the requirements. I always see the requirements as the minimum you can do. There is always more, and you can be proactive in finding out what else you can do to help that department or what other insight is hidden in the data.
- Work on Your Story, Your Findings. You do not want to simply present a dashboard. You want to present it nicely and explain in a clear, simple way what you have discovered, what is relevant, why it is relevant, and what they can actually do about it. Why not be proactive and think about ideas? What is the worst that can happen? You only have to lose if you do not try to go this extra step.
- Dashboard Delivered and Explained. What now? Well, this is where it all begins. You need to make sure that your dashboard is used and understood. You can monitor usage in all the main BI platforms, and you want to schedule a follow-up, maybe after one or two weeks, to ask the users to sit down and review how they are using it. Can it be improved? Is it doing what it is intended to do in the real world? Is there something more you can add?
Please follow this blog series if you are interested to drill down more into each topic.
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