Category: Data Strategy

May 1, 2021

3 ways to use surveys to quickly figure out your next step when you don’t know what to do

How do you choose your next step? You’d like to do more of what’s working, but sometimes you’re not sure what parts of what you’re doing are working, or whether that pivot you’re considering might resonate with your target market, so you’re not sure what you should do more of or where to focus your efforts. In this post, I...

Categories Data Strategy

April 19, 2021

How I adapted my in-person presentation SOPs for a virtual world | A SOP Story

TL;DR It’s rare that what works in person will perfectly transfer to virtual settings, and vice versa. When transitioning, it’s important to (1) identify your “must haves” in terms of those things you must keep in order to preserve your brand identity and quality of work and (2) vet and tweak your new format according to those “must haves.” Survey...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

April 1, 2021

Improve data integrity, data quality, and business insights with standard operating procedures (SOPs)

Is your data worth tracking? This is a question about the quality and integrity of your data – its accuracy, completeness, and fit with your use cases. And it’s an important question to consider, because low quality data can mean that your business insights are ill-informed. I’ve covered some of these points in my posts on clean data and data classification....

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

March 1, 2021

Choosing the right visualization: A diversity, equity, and inclusion example

It’s frequently the case that we don’t just need to wrangle and analyze the data. We also need to communicate the findings of the analysis so that we can figure out what to do next. This is where choosing the right visualization comes in. In this post, I discuss how different visualization choices – in particular, a pie chart, a...

Categories Data Strategy

January 1, 2021

Vision to Action: Turning ideas into actionable and measurable steps

It can be hard to figure out how to turn big picture ideas and goals into actionable and trackable steps. For many things, the “figuring out” lies in a mixture of clarity, and then reframing and rephrasing. Here we take a monetary target and some other information from a business model, and turn it into something that’s doable, measurable, and...

Categories Data Strategy

December 1, 2020

Analyzing customer reviews and other open-ended feedback to hone strategy

Star ratings are an easy way to measure customer sentiment. But if that’s where you stop, you’re missing out on some rich data. Chances are that you’re sitting on an untapped source of data – the text of customer reviews and other open-ended feedback. Why is it untapped? It’s complex, and it can be hard to know where to start, and...

Categories Data Strategy

October 25, 2020

Accessible PDFs: Good for humans, good for automation

If you’ve ever been to a workshop on accessibility – maybe you’re a professor that needs to create accessible materials for students, maybe you’re a business that needs to post accessible documents on your website or provide accessible documents internally – you’ve heard what sounds like a tired cliché: what’s good for people with disabilities is good for everyone. As...

Categories Data Strategy/Tech Stack

October 1, 2020

Where data comes from for data-driven decision making

It’s easy to say you need (more) data in order to understand what’s going on and make decisions. But where does all of this data come from? In this post, I’ll start with an everyday example – and a spurious correlation – before digging deeper into the nature of data. Do correlations and big data give us answers and insights?...

Categories Data Strategy

April 30, 2019

Can you afford a $90,000 mistake?

In today’s world, we’ve digitized almost everything, including our invoicing and payment systems. Even so, when we don’t support our data flows with an underlying structure, it can be easy to introduce costly human errors. I recently worked with a training client who was using an electronic payment voucher form, but the form still required manual (i.e., typed) data entry...

Categories Data Strategy

December 5, 2016

Training for Best Practices and Clean Data

There are a lot of things we each need to learn to be successful in the workplace. Some things just need to be memorized and recalled, like which storage closet houses the pens or the light bulbs. But most of what we need to learn is a process, from emailing to filling out paperwork to entering work orders to performing...

Categories Data Strategy/Training