Structuring Effective Meetings

Date: September 15, 2017

Abstract: This webinar is for statisticians and data scientists whose goal is to increase their impact on projects by improving the way they collaborate with others. We believe that structuring a problem and then structuring a meeting with a domain expert are first steps toward establishing collaborative working relationships. We will introduce the QQQ process, which is effective structure for any applied statistics or consulting problem. We will also cover the POWER structure, which provides an easy-to-use method for organizing a meeting for success. With these structures in place to support collaboration, statisticians can free their brains to focus on the context of the problem and the details that lead to effective statistical solutions to answer the domain experts’ research, business, or policy questions. We have found that by using such processes and structures, statisticians can increase their impact on projects and improve their collaborative relationships with others.

Speaker bios: 
For the past 10 years, Eric Vance, an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been the director of LISA (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis) where he has trained 256 statisticians to move between theory and practice to collaborate with 9000+ domain experts to apply statistics and data science to answer their research or business questions. He has taught workshops and webinars on collaboration around the world, including several in collaboration with Heather Smith.

Heather Smith has 27 years of experience consulting with academic, industrial, service, and government clients in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She began this work as a statistical consultant at Westat, Inc. For 20 years she has been a faculty member in the Statistics Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where she consults with academic and private sector researchers and teaches a wide variety of applied statistics courses, including courses in statistical communication and consulting. She has offered over a dozen workshops, short courses, and webinars on these topics, and has trained hundreds of statistical collaborators.

Watch the recording of this presentation here.

Presentation Slides