Working with the practice
An engagement is scoped against three things: the question that has to be answered, the data that already exists, and the date the answer is needed.
How an engagement runs
What the organisation does, what data exists, and the date the answer is needed. Where a question cannot be answered with the data available, we say so before the work starts.
What will be measured, how, and what the analysis will do — agreed and dated before any of it runs. An analysis plan written afterwards is a description of what was found.
Run against the specification, with the assumptions behind each choice recorded as they are made rather than reconstructed at the end.
The reports, the code and the brief that lets somebody else pick the work up. Whether an engagement ends in an internal report or a published paper is settled at the start.
What a client receives
The question as it was agreed, what was done, what the data can and cannot support, and the specification behind every figure. Written to be read by an analyst as well as by the person who commissioned it.
The same conclusions without the apparatus underneath them, for a board paper, a funder update or a meeting where the analysis has fifteen minutes. Prepared alongside the full report rather than cut down from it afterwards.
Every script that produced the results, documented and ordered so the analysis runs again from the raw data. With it, a brief written for whoever analyses that data next: where each input came from, what was derived, and which decisions would bear revisiting.
Commercial work is scoped to what the business asks for and stays confidential from the first conversation. The question comes from inside the organisation rather than from a research agenda, and the date is usually one somebody else has already fixed.
The analysis is the same; the audience for it is different. A charity answers to funders, to trustees and to the bodies that commission its services, and each of those reads a different document. All three come out of one piece of work.
Research groups bring us in before a bid and after an award: the statistical and power sections of a proposal, then the analysis lead on a work package across a consortium, carried through to peer-reviewed publication.
Describe your organisation, the data and the deadline, and we will say what is feasible.