- Establish a Vision and Strategy
- What’s a vision?
- What’s a strategy?
- Understand Problems & Opportunities
- Problem Statement with examples
- Build Consensus
- Collective Consciousness – Align on Outcomes, not problems
- Turn subjective concept into objective metrics – modified Delphi Method
- Value of a central player (agnostic of teams)
- List of Questions to identify overlaps, dependencies, and critical path
- Be MECE – Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE)
- Apply Prioritization Methods
- Unearth the Top 5 – Aggregate Individuals Stack Ranking of Opportunities
- Risk Priority Number (RPN) Method
- Start with 80% of a Proposal, align on core direction (avoid detours)
- Size and Scope
- Define the scope with a process, a population, or product
- Need quick wins – Focus on what you can control with the resources you have
- Scoping a process
- Scoping a population
- Scoping a product
- Art of the Scope – balancing ‘collective consciousness’ and ‘moving fast’
- Storytelling that sticks
- Start with ‘The Why’, establish ‘Key Outcomes’, focus on ‘time to impact’ & ‘control-ability’
- Human think in Magnitudes, Comparisons, Anomalies, and Emotions
- Make it Stick – How you make them feel over specific knowledge on topics
- Establish and Track Success
- Containing the definition of success – Financial Resources, Time, People, Experience
- The world of metrics
- What can’t be measured, an alternative approach.
- Critical Thinking Problem Solving Frameworks
- First Principles – Break down complex problems into basic elements and create innovative solutions from there.
- Issue Trees – structure and solve problem in a systemic way with map of problems.
- Abstraction Laddering – Frame your problem better with different levels of abstraction.
- Inversion Thinking – Approach a problem from a different point of view. e.g. Am I think of ideal solutions or scenarios? How could an obvious solution be bad?
- Productive Thinking – Solve problems creatively and efficiently with 6 questions.
- Conflict Resolution Diagram – Find win-win solutions to conflicts.
- Ishikawa Diagram (Fishbone) – find root causes to problem.
- ‘Must-Have’ Technical Skills for Scalable Problem Solvers
- Acquiring Data (Python, SQL, APIs, web-scrapping, spreadsheets) Storing Data (databases, data ingestion methods)Transforming Data (Python and SQL) Extract Insights (Hypothesis Testing, ANOVA, Anomaly Detection, Optimization, etc)
- Automating Tasks (Python, Task Schedulers, Alerts)
- Applying Machine Learning (use-cases, purpose, pros/cons, limitations)
- Selecting best visualization (fit for use visualizations)
- Harnessing cloud resources (containerization, AWS, GCP, Docker)
- Useful Analytics Techniques and Concepts
- Forecasting
- Classification
- Anomaly Detection
- Linear Programming
- Stochastic Programming
- Decision Trees
- Modern Portfolio Theory
- Expected Value
- Fitting Distribution
- Probability Density Functions (PDF)
- Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF)
- Mean, Variance, Standard Deviation, Coefficient of Variation (CV)
- Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)