Synthesis – or Finding Trends

As I look across the documents, I look for certain things:

•  Trends – there are a couple of things I look for across projects and organizations, but other trends will come up during your document review.
  • Does every external-facing document have 15 versions with 14 reviewers?  A good sign you are dealing with a fearful and risk-averse culture.
  • Are the members of the project team spinning their external-facing documents to be “all positive, all the time”?
    • You may be dealing with a significant trust issue between the workers and their leadership and/or a highly competitive (and dysfunctional) workplace.
    • I have learned over the years that information meant for general senior executive consumption will be:
      • Biased towards the positive – making the project team look good
      • Very high level and not the whole picture – details will need to come from elsewhere
      • Designed for a discussion meeting and not stand-alone – ask if there are meeting minutes or emails resulting from that discussion
    • What is the general reaction to “bad news”?  Does the messenger get help (positive) or get shot (negative) or gets help THEN gets shot (passive-aggressive)?
  • Is information being sent to a particular individual is being communicated one way, and that same information sent to another audience is being communicated another way.
    • You may have just pinpointed your “messenger shooter” (if everything spins glowingly positive) or your “servant-leader” (if the majority of your sources to that individual provide “opportunities for assistance”)
    • Is the individual behaving within the norm of the culture or is he/she an outlier?  I.E – if the communication to one particular leader (across all authors) is more “positive” vs. what is sent to the other leaders and to each other, you may have a cultural outlier.
• Lessons learned that were not captured in the formal “Lessons Learned”
  • Often, the lessons learned is done after the project.  The project team is either basking in the glow (or grief) of a closed project OR it is a long time after the project completes and the project team has scrubbed the memory of the project from their heads as they move on to other things.
  • This information may appear in either one document or across multiple documents (emails, meeting minutes, budget, project plan)
• Clarification of any contradictions I identified within individual sources
  • Is there only ONE source reporting a piece of information and that information is contradicted by multiple other sources?
    • The more sources that corroborate a piece of information – the more likely it is true
• Individual author tone across documents
  • Gather everything a particular author has created for the project – any trends?
    • Serious? A sense of humor?
    • Detail oriented or high-level?
    • Any “fixations?”
    • Generally excited about change or regularly expressing concerns?
  • How is the interaction with particular individuals? Positive and friendly? Tense? Sarcastic?

During this entire process, I am collecting questions and developing conclusions.

The next step is to confirm any conclusions I have developed and attempt to get answers to any questions that may have come up as a result of my document analysis.

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Resources

All Wikipedia articles should be used as a starting point for further exploration.

Wikipedia – Eyewitness Testimony

Wikipedia – Historical Method, Eyewitness Evidence

RJ Shafer – A Guide to Historical Method (affiliate link)
Previous posts

I Love Documents – Which documents to collect

The Benefits of Historical Methodology – Steps to analyze your documents

Step 1: Document Analysis – Analysis of individual source documents