I recently talked to a statistician, that initiated a small company internal group of statisticians to drive forward methodological innovation projects. While this surely will help the individuals to learn more about statistical methods, it was less clear, why and on which topics the group should focus their activities on.

While most of our day-to-day activities consist of running clinical studies, submissions, and directly related work, we also engage in such innovation work streams or process improvement working groups and other such activities.

Today, we’re giving you advice on how to best pick the right projects to work on as you usually have some influence on this.

Specifically, we cover the following questions, you should ask yourself first:
  • Does it help the business?
  • Am I the right person to work on this?
  • Am I excited about it?
  • Do I have the right skills or what would it take to get the right expertise? Can I tap into that?
  • Does it align with my goals?
  • Do I have the resources or can I organize things to accommodate the resources?
  • What other people need to help me?
  • Is that something my supervisor will support?
  • Is it worth taking the risk to move forward as a submarine project?
  • What early validation steps can I take?
  • Do I need a budget for this?
  • Is it a hell yes?

Transcript

Join The Effective Statistician LinkedIn group

This group was set up to help each other to become more effective statisticians. We’ll run challenges in this group, e.g. around writing abstracts for conferences or other projects. I’ll also post into this group further content.

Join Group

I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.

I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.

When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.

When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.

When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.

I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.

Let’s work together to achieve this.