Another training week has come to the end. This week was pretty tense, but we has gained a huge amount of knowledge from amazing trainers. To round the week up we had an interesting Friday project visualizing our curriculum dashboard. The curriculum should show detailed training information for the DSDE2 cohort: all the classes and projects, its duration, trainers, exact date, etc.) There are three groups divided based on the approach of views: the first group looked from the schooler’s view, the second tried to get into the mind of the coaches and the last one should accessed a management perspective.
Task and team
Before I come to our group, I have to emphasize, again, my gratitude being in this amazing DSDE2 group. We organized a short call after receiving the test, made sure everyone found the way to get the data from server, and assigned ourselves in different tasks. I am in the first group together with Frederik and Mary-Leena. We were the first to assigned ourself for the first task to approach the dashboard as a schooler (I think other people wanted it as well but in the end, even more credits went to them because they had dealt excellently to the ‘harder’ problems, in my opinion).
It was a really great working-together. We all contributed in the work, an idea came after an others. We discussed everything openly. Whenever anyone brought in a new idea, the other said whether they liked it or found it nonsense, and even had alternative thoughts developed from it. Now let’s have a closer look in a brief summarize what we did.
The original dashboard
This is the original dashboard given. The running bars standing for different lessons and its duration respectively make a lot of sense, however, we did not like when the view breaks from week to days. We wanted something in a larger view for a better overview. We also found the trainer filter is not quite effectively and there is no category filter built-in, for example if I want to look up when I have Alteryx classes.
Working on the dashboard
Again, this was not easy as it seemed like. We chose to create a stacked bar chart showing each day’s classes by weeks of the month. In the beginning it took us a long time to figure out how to order weekly classes according to weekdays. Everyone tried some crazy calculation and in the end figured out we just need to drag the Weekday feel to the top on the mark cards. Something learned!
In the end everything went well as we expected. We even had sometimes to talk about how we wanted to talk in our presentation.
What could have done better
Although we were happy with our result (within 3,5 hours of working), there are several points we wished to develop on the dashboard. They are:
▸ Bring back trainer filter
▸Have the start of the week in the right position relatively to other rows. Right now every week starts on Monday. Week 4 has 2 last days of February and March continues on the 3rd working day- Wednesday. But it appears also from the beginning of the row because there are no Monday and Tursday for the first week of March.
▸We would wish to use dashboard actions more smoothly.
Lessons learned
We talk about our projects later in the presentation and also about the dificulties while doing the work. Martin brought up somehow that it is our practice for real-life projects in the future. We had learn through this project, to ask questions instead of interpret if we don't understand the data quite well; to accept that we don't have enough of time because we gave our best in the few given hours; and most importantly for me, the power of teamwork.
So that’s it. What a week! I think everybody deserved a really nice sunny weekend now!
Happy weekend 🌞