Consultancy Skills: The Observational Analysis

You should know how to perform a basic observational analysis for a client. The data will often highlight exactly where you focus your efforts.

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As a consultant, it’s tremendously useful to have a variety of tools at your disposal to analyse and diagnose challenges.

One of the most powerful (and least widely utilised) is observational analysis. Observational analysis, as you can guess, is when you observe what is happening and report back your findings.

This is most useful in three situations.

1. Checking processes are followed. It’s common for an organisation to have the right processes in place but still struggle to achieve success. In this case, you need to check if the processes are being followed correctly (and how consistently they are being followed). For example, you might observe how sales calls are being made, and how customer service is being handled. You might evaluate each incident against the processes/training and see what’s happen…