Client: TIL
Project: Week 1 Friday Project Insurance Data
Project Brief:
The purpose of this project was to introduce us to Friday projects by giving us an opportunity to put what we had learned about data prep planning into practice. As well as presenting our work to our fellow data schoolers, we were joined virtually by DSDE8.
The main objective of the brief was to put together a data prepping plan that could be handed to a colleague and followed to produce a final data set. My data set was composed of 3 files. A policy table that included a list of car insurance policy numbers as well as policy information like holder DOB and the make and model of the insured car. A table that detailed every claim as well as the claim amount. Two dimension tables for marital ID as well as coverage type.
Execution:
I used excalidraw to visualise most of the planning, which enabled me to label screenshots of the data sets detailing what parts of the data required cleaning as well as the type of cleaning. For example one column contained make, model, colour and year and it needed splitting up, this step was shown in excalidraw. I was happy with my plan as well as my presentation, but I know I would benefit from familiarising myself with presentation tools such as zoom and spotlighting the cursor.
What I learnt?:
I learnt the importance of planning data prep before actually doing it, as once I started working with the data in tableau prep I was able to refer back to my plan. Having a clear labelled plan with screenshots of the data set meant whenever I finished a step and was unsure what to do next I could refer back to my plan. In addition to that, during the data prep process I could go back and edit my plan to highlight any hurdles I encountered. One example is when the auto-split function wasn’t splitting properly, so I got to learn some of the syntax behind tableau’s split function.
Advice for any future DSers:
My advice to any future data schoolers would be, that even if you feel confident you can go straight into prepping data, make a plan. The purpose of this project was to make a plan that could be picked up by a colleague and they could follow your instructions and finish with a workable data set. What I discovered was through writing my plan with the expectation it would be used by someone else made my data prepping so much easier.
