‘Failing to plan, is planning to fail…’ the old adage goes. I’m pretty sure the research manager who taught me how to tab spec opened training sessions with that quote – or maybe I made that up – but it fits the purposes of this blog so let’s run with it…
The Art (and Agony) of the Tab Spec
I used to enjoy crafting a tab spec. There was something strangely therapeutic about it. Whiling away the hours coming up with every single possible combination anyone in the project team, or indeed the end client, could come up with. Page after page of different combinations, of demographics and questions, stat tested to within an inch of their life – what fun!
And yet, that isn’t what still has the team laughing at me today – OK, presenting using acetates (for those of you scratching your heads, Google it) is still the most laughed at, but this runs in at a close second – when the tables were delivered, to us research execs in the noughties, we used to print them out and check them by hand using the raw counts.
I am still not sure why we did it, but everyone else was, so off to the printer I went, Bic in hand, ready to rifle through stacks of A4 with abandon (just to be clear, we did recycle, but it’s still not a good look is it?)
When Planning Still Led to Failure
Why am I taking this particular trip down memory lane? There were lots of things I did twenty years ago which seemed very logical, but now in the reality of the mid 2020s seem a bit daft – I am now filing ‘hours spent creating tab specs’ to that list.
Why? Well, it did not matter how much time I spent doing them, every single time there would be something I missed, and usually it would be brought to my attention at 6.30pm on Friday, when our DP partners were already on their way to a well-earned weekend break. I planned and planned and planned and planned, and I still failed!
The Real Problem With Manual Analysis
The disadvantage of our very manual approach – beyond it being very manual – was that we could never fully anticipate what analysis we needed for custom market research projects, until we got our hands on the actual data. With this manual process, we had no agility to adapt our approach.
A Smarter Way: Agile Analysis in Action
In today’s world, we don’t have to predict what analysis we need, we can instead rely on agile solutions to work with the data as it comes in and make decisions based on the information in front of us. That’s where we are lucky at Walr, with our own Analysis & Reporting tool within the Walr Platform.
As a project starts to fill in field, we get immediate access to the data so we can start to create tabulations, using the intuitive drag-and-drop functions, and understand what cross breaks, segments, weighting schemes and statistical testing make sense for the specific project and its objectives. All work can be saved in sessions, revisited and optimized as the fieldwork progresses. Less of a topline and more of a constant process of iterative improvement, which allows for the creation of the right deliverables at the right time.
When Standard Tabs Still Make Sense
Now, I am not saying there is no room for the creation of standard tabulations ahead of time. For demographic data and ongoing tracking studies, for example, our data processing teams have sessions saved and ready to go for those scenarios where clients have a good steer on what they need, allowing them to start their analysis from a helpful base.
It’s more about benefitting from getting your hands on the data in a flexible manner, which enables you to deliver the biggest impact on the insights generated. We believe in this so much, we give access to our Analysis & Reporting tool to all our clients who use Walr for survey programming services, free of charge.
The 6:30pm Friday Test
This takes me back to my former research exec self, and it probably says it all. Instead of staring at my tabs at 6.30pm on a Friday, slowly realizing I’d forgotten to break HCP speciality by intention in my 50-page tab spec, I could have jumped onto the Walr Platform, built the hierarchy on my banner, exported to Excel, and sent the updated analysis to my client.
I’d have been in my Toyota Aygo, listening to one of the six CDs in my autochanger, before the clock struck 7pm!
