Seek clarity

Ask and You Shall Receive: Questions Are the Answers

These were the first words that came to mind when I sat down to write this short article. In the context of consulting, seeking clarity serves two key purposes: ensuring that you can deliver what is truly expected of you and anticipating potential problems and delays.

I am currently working on a project that perfectly illustrates this point. It's a dashboarding project where, at the initial stages, the client informed me that they would provide dashboard-ready data, and that no data modeling or engineering would be required on my side. I assumed everyone involved shared a common understanding of what "dashboard-ready" data meant.

Fast forward a month, and I discovered that communication had not flowed as smoothly as expected. Instead, it felt more like a game of "telephone" (or what some call "Chinese whispers"). To make matters worse, we were playing the game distractedly, as if using smartphones during the process.

After some investigation, I learned that my client had instructed their junior analyst to request data on sales and quotas for product categories from the data team. The data team assured the analyst that the data would be ready by the end of the month, and my client then told me we'd have "dashboard-ready" data within that time frame.

The mistake I made was assuming that everyone had the same definition of sales, quotas, and categories. I knew my client wasn’t a technical person, but I failed to directly communicate with their data team for confirmation.

As a result, we faced delays at various milestones, though we eventually delivered the project to the client’s satisfaction.

What could I have done differently?

I could have sought clarity at every stage of the data process by asking questions such as: What aggregation will be used? What time periods are covered? What is the exact scope of the data? Additionally, I could have created a draft dashboard early on and asked my business client to review it and think about which figures they wanted displayed and in what format. This approach might have led to greater clarity at the start of the project and fostered better collaboration with their data team.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that you badger your colleagues or clients with endless questions. Instead, seeking clarity means thinking several steps ahead. Done correctly, it not only helps you appear thoughtful and proactive but also spares you the headaches that come with delayed projects.

In future projects, I plan to be even more proactive in seeking clarification and continue delivering the right results within the timeline.

I hope some of this resonates with you. See you next week for lesson 3 of 10.

For reference, the original post : https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7239299421488754692/