Project Management Tip of the Week - 17th January 2023

Jasmine here from LVL Up Consulting with this week's project management tip of the week,

This week's tip is about how to communicate your analysis effectively. This is a huge one, this is not just for business analysts, it's also for PMs, project sponsors or change managers, anyone that is looking to take a ton of findings and put them into a succinct document, these tips are for you.

You've probably experienced this (I most certainly have) that you can fall in the trap of analysis paralysis. And what do I mean by that? Well, when you have lots of data to digest, whether you've done interviews, you've got transcripts, you've got a lot of raw data that you're working with, it can be very overwhelming to know where to start and how to communicate that effectively.

So here are my top tips…

First and foremost, get all of your findings into a raw data format. So whether that's an Excel spreadsheet, Word, whatever your tool is, it can be dirty. It doesn't have to be pretty. But get all of your findings into one place as your master source of truth.

Then from there, have an initial cut of the trends and what you are seeing in the data. What stands out, what's an anomaly, what's quite interesting, and make a note of that.

The third thing that I always like to do is get solid and tight on what the format is of how I'm gonna present that data and get some feedback from the people who will be reading the data as to whether that format and those headings work for them.

And then it should be a case of putting that data in succinctly into that draft document.

Now, the final part, which is extremely important so that you do communicate your analysis effectively, is to go back over it and to make sure you have written everything succinctly, clearly, and you're getting to the point quickly.

Because what often happens with project management analysis is that there's lots of data to digest, not not just you, but from the stakeholders who'll be reading the document. So you've heard me said this before and I'll say it forever. Always write in a style of the what, the so what and the now what. And that includes your analysis as well.

So be succinct, be clear, look at the trends and so that you can talk very clearly about what those opportunity areas are and what the gaps are for your analysis. They're my top tips.