My Week as a Project Manager - Day 1

Part of the Data School Curriculum involves each member of the cohort taking the role of Project Manager. This week DS28 will undertake our second client project and I am taking the roll of Project Manager.

The morning kicked off with the client brief where we were introduced to the stakeholders and what the project would entail. The overall brief was clear however we as a team were given a reasonable amount of flexibility on what our dashboards would analyse, which meant that I will have to steer the project in a clear direction otherwise we may end up with too much to analyse or overcomplicate the project.

Following the brief, we then spent the next hour (or two) going through the data together. I wanted everyone to go through everything so that everyone could pitch into our initial ideas rather than split people into groups straight away.

Once we had got a grip on what data we had, split into three groups, each that would tackle a particular area of the brief.

After lunch, the team spent time cleaning the data and noting any questions we wanted to ask the client in the afternoon. During this time, I went between each of the groups trying to understand any problems they might have had with the data and generally just trying to gauge how much progress we'd be able to have by the end of day.

Our catchup call with the client mainly revolved around clarifying what some of the data meant, the format the data was in and understanding the level of granularity our dashboards were to meet.

Afterwards, I organised some additional calls with the client for tomorrow and sent over some additional questions that we didn't get to in the call. The client has been fantastic at addressing the questions i send their way.

The rest of the afternoon was seeing if there were any other issues with the data but overall progress was good today - It looks like that some of our data is ready to go into Tableau, so tomorrow I'm hoping that we may have some rough dashboards or sheets ready by end of day tomorrow.

Author:
Jacob Kilroy
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