Monday - Internal Project Kick-Off
Monday got off to a snowy start, which when working from home in a poorly insulated flat meant my typing skills were impaired by the fact my hands were so cold. Anyway... Monday was the kick-off day of our first (internal) client project. We began with our project brief meeting, in which we got our project requirements, and got the chance to ask any initial questions we had. Having not done this before, there was a little trial and error with asking the right questions that would steer us in the direction we wanted to go. This is definitely a skill I hope to build up over the next few weeks.
We spent the rest of the day getting started on our project tasks. This was quite daunting, as the data we're working with is pretty big, and it's hard to know how to use it to get the outcomes we want. Let's see how it goes!
After a full day of project work, we finished up with a Makeover Monday challenge. You can check my Viz out here: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/serena.purslow/viz/MakeoverMondayW50/Dashboard2
Tuesday - Creating Fake Data
Tuesday was a little break from project work. We spent the majority of the day working with Mockaroo - a site that lets you generate fake data, which is useful for creating practice datasets, and to imitate data before you have access to it, so that you can get started creating visualizations etc. This was fun, and was also the first time I used Ruby code - which was a bit of a challenge to get stuck into. In the afternoon we had a play with some Quick Table Calculations - creating things like Percentage of Total and Ranks for fields in the rows/columns bar.
Wednesday - Project Time and Train the Trainer...
Wednesday morning was a mad rush to try advance on our project, which we did, but it's that age old problem of the more you know, the more you realise you don't know... The afternoon was a welcome switch up. In a few weeks time my cohort will be running a session, training people outside of the Data School on what we learn, in the Data School. I've had lots of teaching experience in the past, so I should be feeling okay about this, however I can't help worrying that my experience teaching English to small children may not carry over a huge amount when teaching technical data skills to a large group of adults! We finished the day with some Preppin' data challenges. I've really been getting into these, I've done 4 this week as they get pretty addictive.
Thursday - Our project deadline is getting closer!
Today was our another full day of project work. Stress was running a little on the high side! We've got a huge amount of data to work with, in multiple tables that don't always join together when and where you need them to. I spent the morning working on creating visualizations and BANs for my part of the project, then spent the afternoon scratching my head as to why some of the rest of my groups' data was not aligning. We finally figured it out, after help from some more experienced saviours around the office! Hopefully things are starting to come together, ready for the big day!
Friday - Project Presentation
Tomorrow is our presentation day. I'm expecting tomorrow morning to be pretty hectic as we pull everything together. I don't think the nerves will kick in until this point. Hopefully all goes well!!