Effective Communication in Data Analysis

Hi! I am Marcus — a Management of Information System (MIS) bachelor graduate from the Republic of China (Taiwan). I have a background in marketing, product management, and business analytics and currently work as a Data Scientist in an e-commerce company. I would like to share in this article the importance of communication that I learned when I was a business analyst before.

Communication in Data-related Roles

We often see good communication as one of the requirements for data-related roles. But what exactly is good communication for the roles and why is it important?

Many articles written by business analysts would tell us that the job of business analysts is to deliver reports for business meetings. However, because of these cycles of going back and forth in requesting reports, the real value of data is often ignored and misunderstood along the way. This is where the importance of communication comes into play.

There is rarely wrong data but there can often be unclear definitions. Take e-Commerce as an example. When will your sales be calculated — as soon as the transaction happens on the internet or when the products have been delivered to customers already? To become a successful business analyst, you should first align the definitions, format of report, and timeline with your stakeholder before getting into the data. Doing so is a key to reducing additional requests for clarifications from business stakeholders and ensuring the effective delivery of insights to them. Otherwise, I have witnessed many colleagues drowning in the requests and pressure of approaching deadlines including myself once.

Checklist for an Effective Communication

Therefore, what are the specific things we should take note of in our business communication? I will split them into three parts: knowing the goal of the report, identifying who the audience is, and taking note of the report’s urgency.

Knowing the goal of the report is the first thing to take note of, in order for the business analyst to align with the stakeholder in which data or resources are available and appropriate for the request. Sometimes, the business stakeholders don’t really know what data and numbers to check for their questions. That is the reason why you got hired in the first place. Thus, you should make sure that they have the correct resources rather than simply giving what they ask for. This will save you time from future corrections and will also buy you trust from the stakeholders.

Identifying who your audience is the second step to take note of as this ensures you hold the right content for each stakeholder. With the same report but a different audience, you need to pitch your findings in different ways. You can hardly tell the same story to the sales team and engineering team and expect that both were satisfied and were able to understand your message similarly. Thus, knowing your audience and highlighting what they are really interested about in your report can become another strength for you.

Last but not the least is taking note of the report’s urgency. In a day-to-day scenario, we rarely get only one request at a time. And often, the order of the requests doesn’t necessarily equate to its urgency. Therefore, you should note which one has a timeline and which one can wait especially when the computing resources are limited. Doing so ensures that you are able to deliver both the critical and non-critical reports in their respective deadlines.

To end, by doing the above-mentioned ways, not only that you can be more comfortable getting into reports and analysis but also you will become an effective business analyst. And once you are more familiar with the business, you may even consider including Tableau or other tools for your reports to make the impact of data stronger. But that’s for another discussion.

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