Analysts are a pain in the... — Transcript
[00:00:00.04] Ken: Go ahead.
[00:00:01.06] Jim: - All right, our next topics are, analysts are a pain in the ass, and I consider myself fortunate to have spent more than 30 years working with first-class analysts. I consider myself to be primarily an analyst, and consultants are essentially analysts. naturally observant, quick to synthesize, and brutally curious. It’s very difficult to spend your time with analysts, I would say, because they will say things you don’t want to hear and do things you don’t want to see and you put two or analysts together and they will never reach agreement on the lunch spot. So that’s, uh, and yeah, so your thoughts, Ken, do you consider yourself an analyst? And if so, are they a pain in the ass or is it just, uh.
[00:01:04.29] Ken: I don’t know that it’s, yeah, I don’t think. Yeah, I don’t consider them a pain so much. I agree with you about that, you know, they often focus on minutiae and disagree with each other, and I think sometimes the problem I have is they sort of expand the scope of the issue and never answer a question. So you’ll ask, you know, “Gee, is the sky blue?” and they’ll go, “Well, what’s the refractive index of the clouds today? And, you know, those sorts of things. So I agree they can be difficult to work with. On the other hand, you know, you got to appreciate somebody that is seeking a clear understanding of the issues at hand, trying to bring a structured approach to solving the problem, looking for facts, and I’ve never minded being asked questions or challenges. As a matter of fact, I thought that was one of the things in our business. I wish more people would have challenged me. That all said, so that’s kind of the positive side. I think, analysts to use to be effective need to be managed effectively, you know, and often some of that just involves somebody’s got to make a decision at some point. I think left to their own devices without a clear, some structure to come to an end of analysis. analytical process, they will go on forever. So you either need, you know, clear timelines or a clear scope and bring it back to the scope. I remember where we’d write, you know, this is what we’re here to solve on the whiteboard, and every once in a while, we’d all point back to it and say, we’ve gotten far afield ‘cause we’re talking about lunch now, and our problem is to solve this financial issue, and so, that’s kind of my take on them. I’m curious what brought this topic to mind though. Did you have, is this some kind of catharsis or is it something came up that brought this topic to your mind?
[00:03:22.69] Jim: So, uh, yeah, so what four or five years after I retired, I had the chance to, uh, have lunch with, uh, uh, previous client actually one, uh, along. client, so who at that point probably knew me on a personal level as well as a professional level, and in a client that I had admired over the years and actually learned a lot from, and for the first time she said to me, “You know what Jim, I never…” I never knew what was going to come out of your mouth next, and I had to turn that over in my mind for a while, basically analyze it.
[00:04:19.56] Ken: Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
[00:04:22.48] Jim: Well, she didn’t give me any more information, and so I finally landed on, “I’m going to take that as a compliment.” But it also opened my eyes to, it took me a long time to learn the lesson that just because I see something, you know, observe something, and just because I was able to synthesize it to a conclusion that made sense to me. It didn’t mean I needed to share that with anyone and I think
[00:04:57.87] Ken: My wife taught my wife taught me that lesson years ago
[00:05:15.09] Jim: That I may see something and understand it, but I don’t need to share it, and I don’t need to share it with employees, I don’t need to share it with a client, and that would probably be for the better, where I would say most analysts or consultants, once they realize that they’ve got a peek at something, that’s an “aha” moment. Yeah, they have to share it, you know, they have to share their conclusions and they will, and I fell into that camp for many years.
[00:05:47.92] Ken: You know, I think I think there’s something to it. When you’re analyzing a situation and now put on my analyst hat rather than my how do I how do I manage that? You invest a lot in, you know, kind of a, there’s a lot of intellectual investment in an analysis and in results and things like that, and you, it’s not that you forget, you’re just so excited and so vested in what you’ve found, you’ve got to share it. it comes out. I did eventually learn the same lesson you did, which is, you know, you don’t need to say everything, and I kind of got that lesson from teaching my kids and coaching kids in baseball and soccer and stuff, which is there’s a time and a place for everything. There’s an amount you can deliver, and there’s context that as an analyst you have that your customer doesn’t. You know, you’ve put a lot of time and thought into this and they’re off doing their day-to-day stuff, you know, managing people or worried about projects and all that and setting the context for any. analytical results is critical in getting people to accept them. When you’re with a group of analysts and they’re all analyzing, they all have the context, you know, of the conversation and all that and the benefit of that. But once that context ends, and I think this is where they may get a reputation as a pain in the ass. that session ends and you go to, you know, you proudly go to present your results to somebody, that somebody doesn’t always have the context, and that’s, that creates communication issues and the perception that an analyst is the pain in the ass because they’ll come up to you and say, “Hey, you know, you need to change these six things.” And without… providing the context as to why. Anyway, neither here. I’m not sure I agree they’re a pain in the ass. I think analysts are a great, you know, debate’s good. Structured approaches are good. But kinda, you know, someone has to make a decision. One of the big problems. working with analysts is if you’re looking for a consensus, it’s not gonna happen often ‘cause sometimes analysts are like, they will present a contrarian point of view because they pride themselves in presenting contrarian points of view, so.
[00:08:31.50] Jim: - Yeah, yeah, no, I think it’s necessary, And I have seen more wily clients use it to their advantage, the classic, and see if this rings true to you. The classic one is, you know, we started so many projects with interviewing clients, and you go to interview a certain… client, or more importantly, our staff would go interview an important client and they would end it with, “Well, you know who you really need to talk to is so-and-so.” Well, they knew when they said that that they were launching a grenade because, you know, some political thing. things they couldn’t bring into the conversation, but they knew as soon as a bright, curious person sat down with that person that they just referred them to, that they would open up about who knows what, and sometimes it would take a while to recover from, you know, somebody in interviewing and coming back with, did you know this? Did you know that? And it was patently out of scope and not a place we wanted to go.
[00:09:53.97] Ken: - Yeah, yeah, that’s true, that’s true too. That gets back to my comment about the, and this has to do with the level of maturity of the analyst too. people who were newbies who would immediately dive into, you know, well, Sally spends so much time in the bathroom that she’s not getting her work done, and the more savvy analysts wouldn’t go down that path, you know, that, and I’m going to, it’s not savvy, it’s maturity, it’s a question of learning and skills and things like that. They’d say, oh, really? Now, let’s get back to what I’m here to focus on, you know, why is the accounting work not getting done? And it indeed could have been Sally, but often, you know, those, those kind of side topics come up and a good analyst can avoid them and avoid being a pain. But a new, and I’m not going to say even a pain. a bad analyst, I’m gonna say an inexperienced analyst, can get drawn down into rabbit holes that really don’t matter.
[00:10:59.95] Jim: - Well put, and I think my take on that is to always remember that as a consultant, in our case, we were brought in because A lot of the projects that we were being consulted on were projects that a state might do once every five years, but that we were knee high in week in and week out in maybe ten states. So that was the knowledge that we were being hired to bring. We weren’t being hired to analyze their operations, which they were extremely smart about. We weren’t being, well, in some cases we were, but if it was a systems project, maybe not so much. But we weren’t, we weren’t there to analyze their politics and things like that. We were there to bring industry knowledge that we had from.
[00:12:00.21] Ken: Sites. All right, and our analysts were simply there to apply that knowledge or to understand the problems these individuals faced and apply that knowledge to apply that knowledge to the problems they face. So any summary of this conversation? our analysts a pain in the ass?
[00:12:29.75] Jim: All I will say is if you say or do something in front of an analyst, they’re going to capture it for later analysis.
[00:12:37.75] Ken: It may be worse than video. Fair enough.