Attention to detail

Attention to detail can be broadly defined as “being thorough in accomplishing a task with concern for all aspects, no matter how small”. While this topic is relevant to many fields and is critical for fields such as medicine etc, I am going to speak of this in light of consulting in this article.

If you have ever worked with consultants or in a consulting firm, you would have definitely heard of the importance of attention to detail. Being impeccable at ones work is not an easy task to master and takes some effort and practice.

In my experience, I have found that keeping track of the following three points while working, specifically making slides, helps in minimizing mistakes:

• Relevance:  Make sure that everything on a slide is relevant to the goal of making the slide, including titles, and the content. Often some unwanted legacy terms, primarily during copying or porting slides from one presentation to another, creep into the current slide at hand, leading to errors.

• Consistency: Check for consistency of data on a slide with that on other slides in the presentation. It is fairly easy to make these mistakes as it becomes difficult to keep track of all slides due to the sheer volume of work that goes into putting together a deck.

• Semantics: (for lack of better word) Before completing a slide, check for other minor things, such as Typos, Titles for charts and axes, Metrics ($M, years etc) and finally Formatting on the slide.  

With these three check points in mind, and consciously implementing these at beginning until these aspects become ones second nature can lead to higher quality of work over time.