CS07 - Concurrent: - A Question of Trust

Believe it or not, we get hired to answer business questions! But what is a business question? This talk will present a template to help uncover this, even if a request is "simple". We'll learn how to connect the company's growth strategy to a request, uncover the context of why something needs to happen, what specifically needs to happen, and how to go about it – before we do any development. The framework will help us become more strategic, and help us pivot from reactive to proactive insights. This way, each deliverable will become an actionable data product – and we'll avoid coming up with the best answer… to the wrong question! 

Working with applied researchers to leverage data in order to test scientific hypotheses is at the heart of what applied statisticians aim to do. However, working as the team statistician in a large collaborative research team presents unique challenges and opportunities. In this work, I describe many of these challenges, and detail some of the lessons that I learned as the team statistician working on two ambitious large-scale ecological projects: SETr and NAMASTE. The primary objective of the SETr and NAMASTE projects was to use data from reserves in the National Estuarine Research Reserve system to better understand changes in marsh ecosystems. Whereas the SETr project focused on estimating elevation changes in these delicate marsh ecosystems, NAMASTE focused on understanding how changes in sea level impact plant communities at these same coastal locations. Complicated ecological data such as these require advanced statistical methods, but the statistician must balance a potential model's complexity with its interpretability. This talk will focus on methods and approaches for effectively using communication skills to build the trust of the team and to help to guide the project to a successful endpoint.