As a collaboration with my esteemed colleague Sakif Chowdhury, and after each of our recent victories (mine, Sakif's) with scoping during Dashboard Week, we have decided to compile the Ten Commandments of Scope Heaven in two parts.
1. Answer whether thy work will be explanatory vs. exploratory
An exploratory analysis equips the end user to hunt for insights themselves using the product you've built. An explanatory one takes preexisting questions and builds a product that answers them. Knowing what you're building will save you heaps of time.
2. Think through thy workflow
You may see this as a waste of time, initially. Wireframing, however, is one of the biggest time savers out there. I personally also like to write down the things I think I'll need to do instead of poking cluelessly at numbers. Once all is planned out and thought through, it's plug and chug. Yes, you'll run into things you weren't expecting, but it's like Eisenhower said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is essential."
3. Understand thy data types
Before jumping into any deeper analysis, check those dtypes. If your mathematical formula is broken, it could be because you're trying to add a string to a number. You deserve better than to spend an hour wondering why.
4. Be prepared to sell how thee spent thy time.
Your dashboard doesn't speak for itself - you do. It's really okay if you didn't get the super hyper mega ultra machine learning whirligig done. What matters is that you tried, and that you can talk about how you got to the point of having the thing you do have.
5. Fall back on what ye know
If you're an analyst who knows a lot about how to build marginal histograms, cool - can you build a marginal histogram for this project? Perhaps something else you already know how to do can be applied. Yes, projects are excellent learning opportunities, but if your goal is to reach Scope Heaven... then fall back on what ye know.
That concludes the first half of the Ten Commandments of Scope Heaven. As you can see, we have scoped down by splitting our blogs into two pieces. Please, dear reader, visit Sakif's blog on the remaining five so that you too may reach Scope Heaven.