You can find data pretty much everywhere. Any time you observe and evaluate something in the world, you’re collecting and analyzing data.
There are six data analysis phases or steps: ask, prepare, process, analyze, share, and act. Following them should result in a frame that makes decision-making and problem solving a little easier.
Your analysis helps you find easier ways of doing things, identify patterns to save you time, and discover surprising new perspectives that can completely change the way you experience things.
Ask
First up, you need to define what the project would look like and what would qualify as a successful result. To determine these things, ask effective questions and collaborate with leaders and managers who are interested in the outcome of their analysis. Check these examples
- Have you gathered data from new employees before? If so, may we have access to the historical data?
- What do you suspect is a leading cause of dissatisfaction among new employees?
- By what percentage would you like employee retention to increase in the next fiscal year?
Prepare
During this step, the analyst identifies what data is needed to achieve the successful result they identified in the previous step. This step can also involve things like rules for who would have access to the data collected or what information would be gathered and how to present it visually
Process
What we aim to achieve is clean data. And to tell the truth, that is a science on its own. There are plenty of tools, theories, and methods to use but sometimes even a simple Spreadsheet program will suffice. So during this step one might:
- Using proper tools to find incorrect, incomplete or inconsistence data.
- Identify whether your data is biased. Essentially, data that is biased will not be representative of the population or phenomenon of study, our issue we are trying to solve.
Analyze
Next up is to make some conclusions based on the trustable data. Main concept is to think analytically about your data, be critical and be creative. There might be a need to sort and format the data to make it easier to process, create graphs, performing different calculations or get additional metrics
Share
So as the next step, get additional opinions about the findings. This will significantly help to improve the results and ensure that main aspects were taken into account. As the are many ways to share the finding each person has their preference and so does each company.
Act
The last stage of the process, work with leaders/managers within the company and decide how best to implement changes and take actions based on the findings