Help Wanted

Towards the end of last year, I was working to capacity. It made me stick up two big post-its above my desk “Get It Done” and “Do It Right”.

See?

Projects were queuing up and that’s when temptation starts whispering in your ear: “That’ll do”, “It’s good enough”, “You don’t need to check it again”. Of course that’s a nice short-term solution. But it’ll land you a longer-term problem: no future work. 

I know it’s my commitment to a quality job that gets repeat business; I don’t kid myself that it’s my bubbly personality or rakish good looks. And if I do get more repeat business, then at times there won’t be capacity any longer. Or rather there won’t be capacity unless I give up weekends or the boys’ bath and story time – and that’s not what I’m in this for.

So what to do? Well, I’d like to find people that can work alongside me, and do a quality job. There’s two main aspects to my work:

• Data and Surveys: That’s about knowing my way round Excel and Survey Monkey to collect and analyse good data. Then to work out what that data’s really saying and present it, er, presentably.
• Interviews and Focus Groups: That’s about knowing how to construct a conversation and then develop it to understand the most interesting points. Then mining that for the important detail and telling the story of what was heard.

Ideally I’d love to know people that could turn their hands to both, but having either set of skills would be really valuable. It’d be strictly project work, I’d deal with my clients and work with you to get to the best results – and the final output will always come through me and my quality checks.

Do let me know if you’re interested or if you know anyone you think might be interested. Of course, the relationship might work the other way at times too.

(Also, I have a few people that I’ve spoken to in the past that I know may be able to help. I'll be in touch, but please feel free to contact me first!)

Sentiment into Data into Pictures

Don’t get me wrong, the sentiment, the feeling, the strength of feeling, what you don’t hear about and sometimes the what-you-can-read-between-the-lines is all vital. If you can capture and convey that back to a client, it can be hugely powerful. But increasingly, when I’m running qualitative research, I’m turning at least part of it into data

Why? In part, because people ask. “They talked about work-life balance – how many of them?” “65%” is a better answer than “most”. And in part for my assurance, so that I can have even more confidence in my findings. When I re-review data, I tend to find that I was mostly right on first cut, but that a second more thorough cut produces a nugget or two of fresh insight. So I categorise comments into topics, and then I can group topics in themes.

And once I’ve got that, I’ve got data, and then I can present it in nice ways. Then we’re in a world of charts, which is very much my world. So then I might decide that

Might be better presented as

 

Straight away, you can see that “This” is nearly half of the total, which you couldn’t see as clearly before.

 

And then this might just add that bit more clarity and ease of access, and make it stand off the page a bit more.

The possibilities are endless, but they’re possibilities that I love to explore. It’s a long standing ambition of mine to present back a research project via one chart – just like my lecturer presented a term of lectures on the Properties of Matter with reference to one chart. When I achieve it, I’ll let you know…