During our 4 month training period at the data school we will work on 8 different client projects, giving each member of the cohort an opportunity to work as a project manager for a week. In this blog I will discuss some of the details of the project and my experience managing it.
The Project:
In the project brief, we were asked:
- To produce a dashboard for each of the public data sources provided in the project brief slides.
- To build exploratory dashboards that allow the user to find the data they’re interested in to help them make better informed decisions (including a citation and link to the data source).
- To create folders including the workbooks, related data, Alteryx workflows and handover documentation (describing how to refresh the data sources).
- To ensure all workbooks follow the same title format e.g. 220812 UN Comtrade Database 220805 Monthly.
Challenges:
Most of the challenges for this week were data related. Some of the datasets could only be downloaded in JSON formats through API’s which required some complex workflows for us to build in Alteryx. A lot of these data sets were in strange formats such as text documents, others were missing important data needed to build meaningful dashboards and either had incoherent data dictionaries or none at all.
Due to the time it took to get many of these data sources prepped and ready for building our dashboards, some of the team members were unable to complete all the formatting by the deadline, so there were a few inconsistencies amongst the dashboards which Robbin mentioned in our feedback.
My Experience as Project Manager:
Before the project brief on Monday I was not expecting to enjoy my role as PM as much as I did. Being one of the last in my cohort to PM, I realised that I had learnt so much from my cohort during their times as PM’s, so I knew what worked well and what didn’t. Despite the time crunch we were able to get in a few stand up’s, had good communication with the client and managed to get some practice time in before the presentation. Throughout the week I was able to keep up with what everyone was doing and offered help when I could. I made sure not to micromanage, but offered my opinion when appropriate. I used my time effectively by working on the Alteryx API workflows to help ease some of the workload of the team as we had a lot to do within the timeframe.
I received really positive feedback from my cohort at the end of the week. One thing I was told I could improve on was keeping everyone on a tighter schedule which I will definitely keep in mind for any future projects I take the lead on.
Overall, I am really pleased with how this project turned out. Everyone stepped up and smashed the delivery of difficult topics, impressing the client and the coaches.