Our story starts on Monday 5th January 2026. DS55 begin their training and somewhere along the day someone sneezes. Bless yous rush in and we carry on with our first day. As time goes on there's another sneeze and some more blessings! We had no idea what was to come.
A few weeks in a coach comments that we're a sneezy cohort, we start to wonder if we should track the sneezes. What a silly thing to do! We've already missed the first 4 weeks! This would take too much effort! And so we carry on with our training wondering what if...
Let me take you to 11th February. We're all working super hard during personal development time. Somebody sneezes and that lingering feeling to track that sneeze feels stronger than ever. Harry has this sudden sparkle in his eye and the DS55 Sneeze Tracker was born.
Plan & Sketch
Having lived with this data for the last 3 months I felt like I knew it like the back of my hand. I went straight for the user story and sketch today. Today’s dashboard was inspired by all of us but I kept wondering.. who will find this the most useful?
AS A COACH who already knows everything about my lovely little team.
I NEED TO find out if this dataset was worth all the distractions in class so I can confirm they are my favourite cohort.
I CAN DISCOVER who has greater blessing reflexes than their sneeze count.
BY ANALYSING important metrics such as who sneezes the most, who's the quickest blesser, which rooms trigger sneezes etc.
As you will see the dashboard turned out a little different to the sketch but are we surprised? Every project is an iterative process.
Tableau Prep
There wasn't too much data prep needed today thankfully. There were a few human errors like spelling mistakes and lots of columns that needed removing from extra comments we'd added on the sides.
Dashboard
The fun continued as I started building the dashboard! As the charts came together I really enjoyed finding things out about people like who would’ve guessed our most consistent person was Durkka who came 3rd in total sneezes and also 3rd at being the fastest person to say bless you?
We asked the coaches to export the google calendar for us so we could work out the distribution of time spent in each room but ultimately we settled for some estimates. For my dashboard I worked it out by number of sessions per room so from 11th February till 28th April we actually spent 18 sessions each in the Blue and Green room I wasn’t expecting it to be an exact even split. From this I was able to build a scatter plot and divide it into quadrants, determining that Rosling is our safe space with a higher percentage of sessions spent there and a low sneeze count.
I also had a look at a couple sources for the pollen count data (mainly the Met Office & Kleenex) and ended up with a dataset with a pollen severity score out of 5 and the most dominant pollen source for each day. I could then use this to see if there was any correlation between our sneezes and the amount of pollen for that day, and could also investigate if anybody was allergic to particular pollen. In our top left chart we can see in late February Nicola’s sneezes increased with the high pollen score so she might be allergic to that pollen (Alder & Hazel pollen) and on 20th March the pollen score was quite high but Nicola’s sneezes stayed low so she might not be allergic to Birch pollen.
Next Steps & Final Thoughts
Honestly this is the most fun we’ve had building dashboards it obviously helps when you can look for your own name in a dataset. In terms of next steps there’s so many other ideas I had there’s endless directions you could take this, as demonstrated by the fact that we came up with 8 different but still fun and interesting dashboards. For my particular dashboard I would’ve loved to do a leaderboard kind of thing instead of the sneeze & blessings rank. I could also take inspiration from everybody else, I loved the calendar that Fotiana made on hers, the map of the TIL office that Tobin created, and Beth’s comment tracker at the bottom of hers.
This has been really fun seeing a passion project through from start to finish and just very wholesome we got to do this all together. Big thank you to our coach I hope the final two days are just as great as today!