The key to effective insights and analysis is asking the right questions.
You may think you know what you want to know, but it’s more difficult knowing which questions to ask.
Most of the time managers are looking for in depth answers to complicated business questions and situations, and will request answers to an issue that is not well defined or understood.
In these circumstances, the most important and time consuming work involved is for the analyst to explore and fully understand the situation, so they’re better equipped to both pose the right question and provide accurate and insightful answers.
Questions are one of the most powerful tools in a business analyst’s toolkit. Asking the right questions, and asking them well is what sets good analysts apart from average ones.
This article will discuss three steps to help you get started identifying the right questions to ask for your situation: understanding stakeholders, speaking the same language, and defining the business impact.
Understand Your Stakeholders
Before you can identify the right questions to ask, it’s important to first understand your stakeholders. It might seem obvious who they are, but the stakeholders for a product launch are different than those for customer service issues.
Understanding who these people are and what their goals and motivations are will help you to see how a request has come about, and why it matters to them. Ultimately, analysis will only be well received if it aligns with the stakeholders goals, so understanding who they are and what their priorities are provides often invaluable context.
Choose Your Words Wisely
Another way of thinking about which questions to ask is by using the same language as your business stakeholder counterparts. It’s critical to cultivate a shared language or data dictionary within a company, to minimise potential miscommunications that can arise when different people understand terms to have different meanings.
It may seem silly but asking really basic questions to ensure you’re aligned is a really powerful tool and helps save inefficiencies that can arise by having to redo analysis thanks to a difference in understanding.
For example, what your Finance team may mean when referring to ‘Active Users’ or ‘Revenue’ could be entirely different to what your Sales & Marketing teams mean, so aligning on this terminology early on saves everyone a lot of time down the line.
Answer With More Questions
It can also be a good idea to ask yourself and your stakeholders these questions to better define the scope:
1) What is the problem or issue that we are trying to understand better?
2) Why does this matter and how can it help us make a decision?
3) What do we already know about this situation, and what data or assumptions have been used?
4) What is the impact on the business if we didn’t know the answer to this question?
5) In an ideal world, what would be the outcome of this analysis?
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