6. Review of Key Analytic Tools on the Market

Thankfully today we have a large number of tools available that can help us perform vital business tasks - hopefully quicker and more accurately than in the past. As a user or business leader though, there's no time to review them all. Find here my summary of some of the most powerful and cost-effective tools available:

Excel:
The tried and trusted partner of businesses across industries and the globe. Excel is a very flexible tool capable of working with data sets that most companies would typically deal with. The ease of transferring Excel files to new hires is crucial for consistency, though is often a painful task with many hidden calculations taking place in old spreadsheets. Microsoft have added features to make Excel better at displaying results (i.e. Sliders) but if you expect many users to access one sheet it's likely to suffer. A fantastic tool for a single user to perform almost any analysis in short order.

Power BI:
Excels new partner. Power BI is Microsoft's key answer to the push for advanced Business Intelligence, greater interactivity in reporting and easier distribution of results in the form of "on-the-go" access. BI has great ability to construct dashboards and program a set of repeated steps to clean up data that Excel would only achieve across a number of formulae. The layout will be familiar to Excel users though it is a little clunky compared to other Business Intelligence tools. As of 2017 the tool is completely free to download and use as Microsoft continue development and updates are added monthly. A fantastic tool for companies or departments who want to explore something more powerful than Excel. The image below shows the button you hit when you want to upload your dashboard to the internet and give access to team members by simply accessing the webpage (even from their phone).

R Studio:
The power of the internet and open collaboration gave us R Studio. A totally free software package developed open source that gives users access to an almost unparalleled analytic suite. R is very unlikely to crash due to the size of a data set it's working with and has a range of packages to enable complex statistical manipulation or simple summaries. The challenge that comes with R is the flexibility it has is enabled by a console that requires you to type in code to generate results. Therefore the learning curve is far steeper with R than Excel. There are plenty of resources online to support learning though and if someone in your team has a little capacity you should push them towards developing in R.

R Shiny:
Another module within the "R family", R Shiny moves R into app form that can be shared and hosted online. This can become then a fabulous tool for deploying analysis to senior leaders or your wider team. In particular the benefit here is you don't prescribe the analysis results. For instance instead of calculating "optimal" inventory and reporting this, you generate an app where leaders can input expected sales and there comfort level of stock-outs and, dynamically, see the impact there preferences will have on inventory management.

Tableau:
Perhaps the prettiest of interactive dashboard publishers available, Tableau is starting to dominate a growing market. There is a license cost that is often around $1,000 per user so there is some outlay to get into this tool. However it contains the ability to automate processes, do calculations live and represent data in multiple formats in such a way that touchscreen and desktop users alike can interact. From personal experience senior leaders tend to react more strongly and quicker to Tableau than other tools and there is a great value in that.

3. Forecasting and Demand Management

Since 2010 in particular, forecasting has become a serious priority again for many businesses. Part of this is driven by the shear volume of data that is becoming available to businesses and giving us better information to begin to make predictions and judgments with. With the increase in available statistics the importance of demand management (filtering and empowering the forecasts) has increased.

How to Forecast:
1. Identify a metric worth predicting (i.e. sales, volume)
2. Gather or create the data you need
3. Run a Moving Average model, if it is not a good predictor then test other models starting with the next simplest first
4. Share your results and use them for decision making
5. If your results don't influence decisions, educate your leadership or stop doing it

If you're starting, just do bottoms-up (forecast at the lowest level and aggregate up), if you're good at bottoms-up then start forecasting top-down (forecast at the highest level and then dis-aggregate down). 9/10 times this is the path to success so don't waste time in a bunch of meetings debating it - just get started and don't be ashamed to just start with Excel.

Why People Won't Listen and Why You Must Make Them:
Everybody likes to questions numbers, sometimes as a defence mechanism to make their expertise feel valued, sometimes to show that they are paying attention and often to correct what they see as mistakes in the forecasts.
When Manufacturing, Supply Chain or Operations produce the forecasts and assign them to Sales there is a natural reaction to question them rather than discuss the potential impact and scenario plan around it. Even within the same function you'll get questions on accuracy.
Embrace these questions on accuracy and make it so that corrections made transfer ownership to those responsible. There is real danger for organisations walking forward with unclear or gut reaction expectations on the future. Even if your methodology driven numbers aren't perfect there is value for the whole organisation to be aligned behind the same incorrect numbers, than a bunch of people chasing their personal incorrect forecasts.


How to Get People to Listen - Demand Management:
One simple step to do is put your Demand Manager into the Sales and Marketing functions such that the most important forecasted metrics like sales are owned by the people responsible for them. Put the person responsible for forecasts into the function responsible for the most vital metric.
Also, at least during the start of introducing forecasting, put a senior person in charge or someone from your high-potential pipeline as a way of exposure to your leadership team.The person responsible must have a high level of respect from your team.

2. Generating Value From Excel

Excel is ubiqitous and that provides great value. Excel is so common not simply due to Microsoft pre-installing it but because it is powerful, graphical, flexible, relatively easy to use and can be a common skill expectation on both junior and senior staff.

When to use:
Almost always. It's a fantastic software that should be you and your teams default answer to any analysis.
The internet and YouTube in particular host a treasure trove of tutorials and guides that you can assign or suggest to your team to help them solve more complex tasks within Excel. The picture below shows a dashboard (dummy data) I've created in the past that combines data from multiple sources to produce a one stop shop of financial performance of a geographic area of a business. The flexibility and ease of moving objects in Excel turned this into one afternoons work.

People make fun of Excel - Why not to look down on it:
Fair or not, a lot of people dismiss excel as out-of-date for current mobile computing trends and bemoan it's lack if interactivity. Also anyone who works with data has inherited an Excel from a previous owner which has near infinity formula's and calculations that are frankly impossible to track. The result then is scrapping the old Excel file and constructing a new one which will inevitably be scrapped by the next person who inherits it, this is a big amount of time spent re-developing something that has already been solved.
With all of that in mind, Excel can handle 90%+ of the tasks that every business needs to perform. It contains simple practical functions but can also let you use if statements and macros which can replicate some of the strengths of more complex tools like R or Matlab. Recent versions of Excel also have more interactive features like Sliders that enable dashboard building. Excel also lets you have data, calculations and output methods that are all on screen at one time unlike other tools.
In short, if someone comes to you pitching a new tool and are rubbishing Excel, keep an open mind but really ask them to prove why this is a significant improvement on Excel and challenge them because the cost to your organisation to transition even part of your processes to a new tool will be significant.

I am a fan of Microsoft's Power BI though as a step forward but only as a support for Excel, not a replacement.

Maximise You - Comfort Zone and Ambitious Friends

Necessity is the mother of invention as we're spurred to come up with a solution to a pressing problem. That combination of a pressing necessity makes us act and is an incredibly valuable resource to have. If you are in a situation where there is nothing motivating you and you're relying on being a self-starter you are likely to fall behind the curve in term of personal development.


Diagnosing if you are comfortable:
Understanding if your developing can be hard to know. You can work nine to five and operate stress free while developing or work fourteen hour days and have trouble sleeping with stress but be repeating the same tasks and therefore not growing. In this sense when I use comfortable I'm referring to the tasks you are completing are not pushing your technical ability, negotiating prowess etc and therefore not adding to your skillset.
Take a note of what you think you are good at and what you want to be good at then match that to the current activities you're doing. Once you understand how your current work aligns with your skills and ambitions, compare that to what you were doing twelve months previous. If you're not seeing growth or tasks that will lead to it, you can assume your current daily activities are not challenging you and you can describe your work as comfortable. Ignore the volume of work and hours taken, you are comfortable with the tasks.

Diagnosing your peers and colleagues as motivators or enablers?:
Lunch time conversations can often follow a pattern to stay in safe topics. However you must make the effort to challenge your friends or colleagues with an ambitious thought and see how they respond. When I was working with a group of top consultants, I found their self-confidence grating and their ambitions unlikely when we had lunch. But hearing them think they could get their Harvard MBA and $150k job by 26, made me ask the question "Why not me?". If you then find yourself as the most ambitious person in your group, you need to think about adding someone who might expand your horizon in terms of ambitions.

Finding your balance:
Make the assumption that there is only so much of you to give and then realising there is a finite amount you can ever achieve start to prioritise. If you are comfortable with work but unsatisfied with your family relationships, friend engagement or health and fitness it may not be best to focus on trying to redefine your job to a more challenging set up. If your life is in relative balance and work is comfortable, you should really focus on breaking your routine and requesting or simply taking new responsibilities that will help you to develop skills that you've neglected....

Entrepreneurs - Not All Equal

In most of the world today, entrepreneurs are looked on with respect and in many places revered. Increasingly, our T.V. portrays reality shows as a way to see into business owners lives and understand how they operate. Truthfully, we're lucky to have entrepreneurs, the men and women who take risks to build and create is what drives the economy upward. However, we must discriminate among business owners and separate those who deserve our respect, from those who don't.

Not All Equal:
Across the world, there are a huge number of small business owners who can be very vain or petty. Many small towns and villages can effectively be held hostage by a few entrepreneurs who speak up against redevelopment that would subdue foot traffic temporarily, or potentially regenerate other parts of town. So to do we see business owners who reject new ways of doing things, essentially trapping their workers in a malaise and making them unfit for employment after the business fails. Many local government officials could fill you with horror stories of the small mindedness and stubbornness of small business owners.

Of course, there are still a huge number of entrepreneurs who make their workers and their own lives better by the risks they take and goals they achieve. But we should be careful and consider the individual we're dealing with before we offer praise for the entrepreneur.

Graduate Roles - No Straight Path to Success

I work with interns, students and have young relatives who I often see stress out about their path forward. T.V. and newspapers are filled with stories about average graduate salaries rising and, in the U.K., even surpassing the median income. Of course, dig behind the headlines and you find these averages are calculated from the top 100 companies (which employ <2% of grads) etc... painting a totally un-representative picture.

In this vein I will share some very anecdotal stories about how me and my friends performed coming out of high-school / secondary school into university to illustrate it's rarely a simple straight path into top companies graduate programs, and that's not a issue.

My Experience
All these people are aged between 26 and 28 years old. They did not study at Oxbridge but at the level below in UK universities:

S:
Joined Uni, Summer internship abroad, failed second semester totally, no graduate offers, took Masters degree, joined fortune 500 company in full time role.

A:
Joined Uni, straight graduation, 6 month unemployed, 6 month on government work experience programmes, hired by work experience company, acting manager when boss takes leave to look after ill partner

M: 
Joined Uni, dropped out, Joined different Uni course, graduated, unemployed 3 months, took admin job, left and took higher paying job

M(2):
Joined Uni, one year placement, straight graduation, removed from "Big four accounting" intake programme, one year as on-call IT engineer, recruitment agency places into team leader role for national public transport agency, made acting ticketing department lead (4 staff) as manager steps into project role

D: 
Joined Uni, straight graduation, turned down graduate programme at leading retailer, unemployed 3 months, moved to England in rural area to take role in desired field, significant travel, overtime and sponsored learning

D(2):
Joined Uni, straight graduation, work in customer service, return to uni for masters unrelated to bachelors, applying for full time work now

P: 
Joined uni, finished final year abroad, odd jobs for 12 months, enrolled in Masters programme, returned home country for year in finance, joined large company grad programme but leave during probation, return home to work in "big four" accountancy firm

K:
Repeat university entrance, joined medicine school, drop after 2 years, rejoin actuary course, year placement, straight graduation

Again, this is my anecdotal evidence but most of these people are already satisfied with their work or at least or developing and growing in worthwhile roles. This is despite none of them going straight out of school into top company graduate programs as they initially planned for.

Echo Chamber - We Need Fresh Feedback

Self-betterment or engaging meetings are rarely achieved by following the same formula over and over again.

Stuck in Repeat

When in consulting, we often ran Problem Solving Sessions (PSS's) which were called when someone had a problem and needed advice, brainstorming, expertise etc. to help them get to a world class solution. There were clear expectations that the host would bring a specific issue and people were there to really drive towards a tangible improvement by the end of the 30 min / 1 hour meeting. If we didn't have something tangible, we had failed.
Nothing groundbreaking in this set up but we found it incredibly effective in producing content and keeping the project at a high pace.

Two years later, and outside the consulting pace I still continue to participate in and run PSS's but have found that over 50% of the time they are nothing more than a typical meeting. With an ill-defined purpose and tangential discussions which are tolerated due to a clear output not defined or sought. This is a shame but perhaps inevitable that the process corrupts over time- the real failure would be to not realise this and act. However, it wasn't until someone new joined our team and I felt embarrassment at the way these meetings were running that I realised how far we had drifted from effectiveness. It concerns me to think how long we would have maintained this flawed setup if we had not had the stimuli of a new team member come along.

The lesson:

It's a very pertinent lesson and one we all need to keep in mind, fresh and regular feedback on how we are operating is crucial to long term success. If we work with the same people, through the same processes to deliver the same goals without different perspective, we are doomed to degrade.

What to do:

Crucially, you need to interact with others, and have others interact with what your doing. Take the opportunity to invite a manager or a member of another team to one of your regular meetings and talk to them afterwards about what went they thought could be improved. Have lunch with a different function and talk about what's going on in their strategy. Delete your PowerPoint / Excel templates and craft new ones to break the habit of re-purposing out of date formats.

One thing I've found effective is once a month or quarter to set aside 1-2 hours to review crucial tasks I've started to perform on auto-pilot. It's not necessarily bad to standardise things like this, just as long as it doesn't dilute the effectiveness.
In particular, I review my approach to preparing for a meeting.If I'm reaching for the same PowerPoint and re-purposing it multiple times a month, that's a red flag.