Analyst Interrogative #1
Asking the right question?
One of the primary things that an analyst does is ask questions. Some questions take the form of a data query, others are well-formed hypotheses. The vast majority are simply basic questions and these have a tremendous effect on the day-to-day activities of your team and your company.
We often hear of the five w’s. Who, What, When, Where, And Why. These words are formally known as interrogatives and for analysts, the interrogatives you chose are incredibly important.
Unfortunately, the question Who is my customer? is not nearly as simple to address as one might think. This question is quickly followed by all the others. What is a customer? Do I care when they were my customer? Or where? Is this question restricted to a single country or region? Why are we asking this question?
But the real question that an analyst needs to answer is How?
How is a rather unique interrogative. That may explain why its ‘w’ comes at the end. How questions are almost never answered with a noun. I am excluding combinations like ‘How Many’ and ‘How Long’.
When well formed, a How question does not instantly lead to a litany of new questions. For instance, instead of Who is my customer? I would ask, How do I best define my customer in a way that assists my client in… Clearly not a simple question, but one that should almost always prove valuable to the client.
Think about How you might answer the following:
- How do I break down this complex system?
- How do I develop a testable hypothesis?
- How do I leverage insights to create value?
- How do I identify the most important factors?
- How do I model the behavior of this portfolio to make good predictions?
All of these questions touch on the value and insightfulness needed to be a successful analyst. They are not complete or well-formed questions but serve as strong examples assuming you are willing to add a little more detail from your personal perspective or experience. All this delivers us to one final question:
How do I figure out How?
We will address that in the next addition of Analyst Interrogative
Analyst Interrogative is a series created by Corsair’s Institute to increase the reader’s understanding of the analytic process. For more articles like these —please subscribe to Comprehension 360.
