Carragee Consulting

Don’t burry the lead in your analytics report outs

In my personal life I like mystery novels and puzzles. I like to read between the lines and figure things out for myself.

I dislike a lot of journalist reporting that can be misleading with click-bate titles and 10 second sound bite quotes.

Whenever I’m reporting out something I’ve spent time and energy researching I want to bring the audience along through the process, describe my methodology and how I handled outliers plus any other cool tech.

Stakeholders generally don’t care. All the stuff can be in the appendix or you can address it if specific questions come up.

Learn to get to your recommendations and executive summary in the first 15 minutes.

Executives often arrive late to meetings, and have not pre-read your materials. They can get lost in technical jargon easily and your analysis will lose its impact if you don’t get very good at writing the abstract/ Executive summary.

I know this intellectually and I still have to fight my instincts to actually do it.

A real life example of where a highly technical person (my surgeon) buried the lead and I felt blind-sided was when I had my lymph node biopsy done on 8/16.

I had a follow up phone appointment with my surgeon on 8/29 where in the addendum note she wrote that they will have to reopen my arm incision and test/remove more lymph nodes.

She didn’t say this directly on our call and so 9/3 the morning of my surgery, dressed only in a hospital gown and those pathetic anti-slip socks, they made me sign consent forms for the expanded scope of surgery.

I broke down in tears. I was so mad that I would have to re-recover from the surgery they did two weeks ago and risk more permanent nerve damage. WHY DIDN’T THEY TELL ME AHEAD OF TIME?

Well actually they did. In the addendum to the visit notes that you can only see if you log into the patient portal and click 17 things to get to the PDF.

Don’t do this to your stakeholder. Just tell them the information they need for decision making up front, clearly and handle any questions or blow-back head on.Activate to view larger image,