Not all projects are created equal. Some are straight-forward, others not so much. A distinction I use for many projects is a light switch versus a sunrise. The former has a very clear, very discrete outcome — the switch is either flipped or it is not, the project has either been completed or not.
The sunrise, however, is a bit more ambiguous. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the sun has finished rising1. Some may classify it as when the sun first pokes over the horizon, others may say when it finally clears the horizon. Regardless of the answer, there is some gray(yellow?) area. The lines are blurred a bit, and it can be hard to know exactly when you’ve done enough to move onto the next thing.
In the world of data and analytics, most projects tend to have unclear finish lines, they’re sunrises. Further confounding the problem is that whoever you’re doing this project for, the all-knowing stakeholder, also has a say in when the project is completed.
In the absence of a clear finding or stoping point, projects in the data world tend to grow and grow and grow. There will almost always be follow-ups: just one more question, just one more suggestion to take a look at, just one more cross-tab.
I think there are two main ways to help mitigate this:
Having a better relationship with the stakeholder, so you feel more empowered to steer things. Usually this just means saying no.
Showing as much of your work as possible
The first option can be a whole post within itself, and for a whole lot of reasons that I’ll conveniently ignore for now, isn’t always the best option2. Let’s talk about door number two.
Being that most analyses are open-ended, there can be, seemingly, infinite paths to take. Some are quickly exhausted, others might branch into a slew of wild-goose chases, while a number might end up as the focus of future projects. All that to say is, the final product can be a bit of an iceberg — a majority of it below the waterline, out of sight. Most of the work is omitted or buried in an appendix.
Depending on what is above the water line, you might not have a whole lot of takeaways to give the stakeholder. One way I try to think of it is just trying to give them a single insight or data point that they can call upon in the future.
Perception is Reality
It should be assumed that stakeholders will expend as little energy as possible on engaging with it. If you don’t hit them over the head, again and again, with what you did, at the correct time, they will not absorb what you did.
The work will speak for itself, but there’s a lot of stuff the work won’t say. It won’t say you worked over the weekend to meet the deadline, it won’t speak of all the ways you went above and beyond to make sure the job was completed to the best of your ability.
From the stakeholder’s perspective, they need to know that you exhausted as many options as possible before they feel satisfied. They have to see your work. You have to bring them along and say I looked here, I looked there, I did this approach and tried that one. You have to make them feel that you exhausted every option in search for their answer. And you have to tell them again and again, until they can trust that you did everything you could.
In physics — at least in my high school physics class — there were exercises in which we had to plot an objects movement over time3. Objects that ended up in the exact same position, whether or not they ever actually moved, are said to have a change in position(defined as ∆X) of zero. In other words, whether that object never moved or it traveled to the moon and back to the same spot of origin, the equation would resolve to the same answer, ∆X equals 0
And this, after way too much preamble, leads me to the point I’m trying to make about showing your work. If someone gives you a question, and you come back and give them no answer or an ambiguous answer, it will look like you never moved. It will look to them as if ∆X is 0.
And ∆X can’t be zero when it comes to your work.
P.S. Is this just a mechanism of corporate analytics or are there other domains/industries where this sort of dynamic exists? I think the more abstract the job, the more it might hold true.
I’ve heard this referred to before as Sorites Paradox or the Heap Paradox. A common example is a pile of sand. If, by removing one grain at a time, you deplete a pile of sand, at what point does it cease to be a pile. It’s anyone’s guess
Corporate incentives state that if someone has enough to offer, you will do whatever they ask even if it’s a waste of time
for anyone questioning my knowledge of physics I have you know that I own The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and even read about 40 pages of Volume 1
Extremely common experience in medicine – with both patients and colleagues I consult! Often, the public perception of the medical field revolves around what actionable item are you going to do to make me feel better. I frequently find that walking my patients through the complexities of my own thought process gives them a look behind the curtain as to why there isn’t always an immediate or obvious answer. Likewise, the physicians who I find to be the best consultants are not the ones that take my patient for a needed procedure; rather, they’re the ones who “show me their work” when I reach out to them for their expertise.