U N I V E R S I T I E S M A K I N G A N I M PAC T EACH YEAR STUDENTS on MSc programmes in analytical subjects at several UK universities spend their last few months undertaking a project, often for an organisation. These projects can make a significant impact. This issue features reports of projects recently carried out at one of our universities: University of Southampton. If you are interested in availing yourself of such an opportunity, please contact the Operational Research Society at email@ theorsociety.com VALUE OF FREE TEXT DATA AND CAUSAL MAPPING Laura Hannula, University of Southampton, MSc Operational Research (part-time)
Wärtsilä is a global leader in innovative technologies and lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets, operating in more than 70 countries. While numerical data is widely and successfully used across the company to support customers, Laura’s dissertation focused on generating actionable insights from less-commonly utilised free text data. The topic for the dissertation stemmed from the need to better collect and use the innovative ideas and opinions of customer-facing staff in management decision making, without engaging in resource-intensive qualitative interviews. Wärtsilä’s Marine Power Sales team therefore trialled data collection via an ad-hoc staff survey, which became the source data for the exploratory dissertation project in summer 2021. Laura’s dissertation focused on assessing the benefits and challenges associated with the use of free text data. Her practical work highlighted the immense value of drawing insights from free text comments written by employees of various levels of seniority and using these to establish a development roadmap.
With support from Selin Ahipasaoglu from the University of Southampton, she analysed 660 survey responses using Python, experimenting with methods such as sentiment scoring with a lexical model, word similarity, and clustering. Particularly for the text pre-processing phase, it was beneficial that Laura had been working for Wärtsilä during her MSc studies. This is because the high prevalence of company-specific jargon in the responses meant many of the outof-box sentiment scoring packages tested failed to capture the true sentiment of the comments. Secondly, she researched Soft Systems Methodology and Causal Mapping to see if problem structuring could help resolve some of the problems noted in the survey. As a practical demonstration, a causal map with over 200 components was constructed to visualise, and thus help the company move towards solving, the challenge of unclear roles and responsibilities – an issue commonly encountered by large organisations. Lastly, findings were gathered into a Miro dashboard, enabling stakeholders to interact with the output. This
increased the value of the work, as subject matter experts could easily drilldown on insights and make, and share, their own conclusions. Fraser Scott, the thesis supervisor and Chief, Project Evolution, at Wärtsilä: "Our operative staff are keen to tell us of ways we can improve and things that don’t quite work optimally, but the challenge is effectively consolidating the many voices and words into an understandable set of actionable insights. Laura’s project enabled that and much more as we are able to not only hear the insights, but understand the feelings, allowing us to focus on the actions that will drive the biggest impacts for our business. In a further step, Laura was able to drill into what appears to be a simple problem: ‘clarity of roles and responsibilities’, to breakdown the multitude of reasons why this issue subsists, despite management efforts." This is an excellent demonstration of theoretical knowledge obtained from MSc Operational Research studies being applied to a real-life business problem, to create value and actionable insights.
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