Last week, DSNY4 finally had the chance to experience what it is like to work on a project with clients. Because we are still in training, our first client project was an internal one. This meant that one of our coaches acted as the client and gave us the data to use and the requirements to meet. Having an internal project like this was a great learning experience for the whole team and gave us valuable insights into what it would be like to work with actual clients.
After going through that experience, I have compiled a list of things that I learned and will take with me to future projects.
- There can be a lot of different tasks that are all very time consuming, so staying organized while setting deadlines for specific tasks is essential for having a project completed on-time. For example, we set a time for finalizing dashboards so we can go ahead and rehearse for presentations together after that.
- Asking for help is necessary. No one knows how to do everything and figuring things out alone can waste precious time. Reaching out to a team member can allow you to both learn and complete tasks more quickly.
- Collaborating on a Tableau dashboard is quite difficult. We can have two people work through the logic behind design decisions but having more than one person edit the same dashboard is quite difficult.
- Asking the right questions to clarify the scope of a project can simplify a lot of decisions. It is important to figure out the scope as quickly as possible.
- Relational joins on Tableau are very efficient and simple compared to physically joining tables.
- Keeping notes on why you made certain decisions is important for both explaining your ideas to others and keeping track of progress for yourself
- Meeting with team members about once a day can help everyone stay on track. This helps people voice any concerns about their tasks and gives others a chance to help. However, meeting too often can end up wasting some time. It seems like once a day was the sweet spot for us.