Appendix B. Data Project Checklist
There’s a lot more to creating useful data projects than just training an accurate model! When Jeremy used to do consulting, he’d always seek to understand an organization’s context for developing data projects based on the following considerations, summarized in Figure B-1:
- Strategy
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What is the organization trying to do (objective), and what can it change to do it better (levers)?
- Data
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Is the organization capturing the necessary data and making it available?
- Analytics
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What kinds of insights would be useful to the organization?
- Implementation
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What organizational capabilities are available?
- Maintenance
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What systems are in place to track changes in the operational environment?
- Constraints
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What constraints need to be considered in each of the preceding areas?
Figure B-1. The analytics value chain
He developed a questionnaire that he had clients fill out before a project started, and then throughout the project he’d help them refine their answers. This questionnaire is based on decades of projects across many industries, including agriculture, mining, banking, brewing, telecoms, retail, and more.
Before we go through the analytics value chain, the first part of the questionnaire has to do with the most important employees for your data project: data scientists.
Data Scientists
Data scientists should have a clear path to becoming senior ...