Lessons Learnt from 3 hour Friday Projects

Into

Here at the data school, one of the ways we improve our presentation and analytical skills is by doing client projects, these allow us to work with real clients data and experience what its like trying to understand what a business wants and how we can help them.

These client projects span over a week but for our first month in the data school we don't do any full week projects, instead we have Friday projects, we are given data and a brief of what to do with it on Friday morning at 9am and then we have until 1:30 when we have to present it. These projects could be data prep focused or more about using the data in tableau but it usually relates to what we have been learning that week.

Plan

One of the main learning points having done two Friday projects is the importance of planning, this includes planning out each stage of your project and roughly how long you expect each task to take, each project may require a slightly different elements but generally our plans will start with data discovery, followed by cleansing the data and then deciding what story to tell with the data and planning what your final outcome will look like, creating analysis and then forming the dashboard and finally practicing your presentation. Always remember to give yourself a lunch break.

For our last Friday project my plan looked like this.

Do not worry about not sticking to your plan, its just a rough guide to help you split up your time. If something takes longer than expected that's ok when it comes to presenting you can mention that this is what occurred.

Success or Failure?

An important thing to remember with these Friday projects is that you are not being given them to just achieve what was laid out in the brief, the point of them is to give you a feel for what its like being given a task with a short deadline and planning that process out.

If you do not finish you project and didn't have time to create the dashboard you wanted to, that's fine. When you present you can talk about what you wanted to achieve and what got in the way, and then use that to work out what you would do next time. If it took you much longer than expected to come up with the story you want to tell or cleaning the data was a bigger task the you envisioned then you can learn from that for next time.

Presentation

The presentation itself is the most stressful part of a project especially for a new cohort, having to stand Infront of everybody and explain what you did can be very daunting, this is why you must prioritize practicing your presentation. For my first two Friday projects I did not do this and because of that I went into the presentation having not practiced at all, while spending more time on your dashboard to make it better feels important at the time designating time to practice your presentation is much more important.

Its easier to present a poorer project that you have practiced then presenting a better project that you have not practiced.

If you want to create a PowerPoint presentation for your project you can, this can help you when trying to plan out the order of what you want to present. But in a 3 hour project this is not always realistic and presenting without a PP also works, just make sure you have all of your tabs in order and programs open and make sure you practice what you will be saying for each step.

When it comes to presenting Infront of lots of people, try to open yourself up to the audience and really present to them rather than to your laptop screen. Try to scan the room instead of looking at one particular person, but when in a larger space with lots of people I try to avoid looking at everybody sat at the back, I find this helps my nerves.

Final Advice

Try to remember that each Friday project is a learning experience and not a pass/ fail assessment, as long as you take something from it and improve then you have done succeeded. The experience gained is very valuable especially when it comes to the presentation skills, when we are on placement this knowledge gained will be extremally valuable so its important to make the most out of these projects.

Author:
Eamonn Woodham
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