Day 1)

After sitting back for the last three weeks letting my friends in DS29 take charge for client projects, my time has finally come. This week in the data school we have been challenged to assist a payment solutions company for software firms. The request to the data school was to create and present six different dashboards each on a independent sector of the company by Thursday (due to the bank holiday on Friday). Given our training throughout the week, this left us with two and half days to complete the task.

Luckily for the team the client presented a clear brief in our kickoff session supported by further documents with requirements regarding each dashboard. After a group discussion session we decided to tackle every dashboard requested by the client, which we as a cohort have not attempted before. But due to the clean data and now three weeks of experience I have the utmost confidence in my team.

With our questions we wanted to answer through out dashboards and sketches finished by lunch, we pressed forward onto creating the dashboards. However, we quickly ran into a couple of problems we tend to encounter almost every week. Firstly knowing and understanding the meaning of certain fields, and secondly not having a clear field to join different respective tables to each other. These problems have delayed roughly 3/4 of our dashboards significantly. Despite this we did catch up with the client at the end of day and they quickly answered many of our queries with further details to included tomorrow.

Overall DS29 made today easy for myself by sticking to our planning and sketching deadlines, as well as efficiently narrowing down the aims of each dashboard and providing questions to client to ensure we can continue development tomorrow. Fingers crossed the rest of the week continues as smoothly.