A data analyst can extract insights and information from data sets. As a data analyst, you can do many different specialized tasks, including analyzing data and
reporting on the findings. Those reported findings can help a business make data-informed decisions.
In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:
● Utilize appropriate tools and techniques for creating business intelligence reports.
● Apply business intelligence techniques and practices for making data-centered decisions within a business setting.
● Recommend appropriate solutions to business problems that address business needs and requirements.
● Create data visualizations utilizing appropriate tools and techniques for producing business reports.
Scenario
ABC Company is in competition with many companies that provide the same products and services. A personal touch and strong customer service are standards
being set by ABC Company, and this is shaking up the market. To keep up with consumer expectations and initiate new customers from different areas,
expansion must take place. For this expansion, the company needs to answer several business questions. Utilizing business intelligence techniques, a business
can utilize data to create reports and provide insight into those business questions.
For this project, you will play the role of a data analyst at a consulting company that you own. You will be working directly for the CEO in your investigation of
the expansion of this business. You will be asked to evaluate one of seven data sets related to what the company has done up to this point, and you will provide
those insights back to the company. For each of these data-set areas, you will be asked to use Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) tools to build a stunning
visualization of the data and a written report of the insights that were found in the analysis.
Using the IBM Watson Analytics data, choose ONE of the seven data sets and explore the data for interesting insights, and create dashboards using the Microsoft
Power BI tool.
Dataset Deliverables
Create only the deliverables associated with your chosen data set. Click on the title of the data set to view the data in Excel:
2
Data and Deliverables
1 IT Help Desk
The ABC Company’s CEO is interested in examining how quickly issues are resolved and improving customer satisfaction. Analyze the help-desk tickets,
including number of tickets, number of high priority tickets, and average response time. Understand the causes of high-priority tickets, and improve
resolution times with better understanding of ticket details.
The following information in this cell is from the IBM Watson Analytics website:
Background: This data is from an Information Technology (IT) department interested in examining how quickly issues are resolved and improving
satisfaction of customers. To start their analysis, they have this data set of 100,000 closed tickets that were filed at their help desk.
About the data: A total of 100,000 rows. Each row in the data includes:
employee who submitted the ticket
employee’s seniority within the company
IT employee who serviced the ticket
functional area against which the ticket was filed (systems, software, hardware, access)
whether the ticket was a request for new services or an issue with existing services
submitter-assigned severity of the ticket
IT-assigned priority of the ticket
number of days the ticket was open
satisfaction with the resolution of the ticket (reported by the submitter)
2 Employee Attrition
ABC Company’s CEO is curious to find the factors that lead to employee attrition. This will be very important as the CEO moves forward with the
expansion of the company. The stakeholders are interested in this analysis, which will provide some insights into leadership effectiveness. The analysis
should take some key point indicators (Distance, Education, Job Role, Income) and provide an analysis.
3
3 Telco Customer Churn
ABC Company’s CEO is concerned that, during this expansion, customers may leave the company for its competitors. Predict the behavior of customers
and how to retain them. Analyze all relevant customer data and develop focused customer retention programs.
The data set includes information about:
Customers who left within the last month—this column is called Churn.
Services that each customer has signed up for—phone, multiple lines, internet, online security, online backup, device protection, tech support,
and streaming for TV and movies.
Customer account information—how long they have been a customer, contract, payment method, paperless billing, monthly charges, and total
charges.
Demographic info about customers—gender, age range, and whether they have partners or dependents.
4 Accounts Receivable
In the past, ABC Company’s CEO had set up business accounts where the business could carry a balance with purchases (goods or services) that were
made. Due to the expansion, the stakeholders are concerned that the balances will not be paid. The CEO would like to understand the factors of
successful collection efforts. Predict which customers will pay fastest, recover more money, and improve collection efficiency.
5 Operations Dem Planning Bike Share
During this expansion investigation, ABC Company’s CEO would still like to manage the process of matching supply and demand. Explore information
based on usage and external factors to understand the effects of a bike-share program in a major U.S. city to analyze patterns such as the relationship
between humidity and ridership by month, or how temperature and holidays drive usage demand.
6 Retail Sales and Marketing, Profit and Cost
During the expansion process, ABC Company’s CEO realizes that there will need to be a review of the product-related information, such as Cost, Revenue,
and Price, across Years and Ordering Method. This will be especially important to the stakeholders, as they will see what has worked and what has not.
This data set could be used to create a multiple-tab dashboard in Microsoft Power BI. For this data set, you will be an analyst for one of the stakeholders
and find insights in Sales and Marketing, and Profit and Cost. The data is clean and manageable.
7 Marketing Campaign
4
ABC Company’s CEO is looking to add new items to the menu in the fast food department. The CEO needs help determining the promotion campaign for
the new products. Quickly analyze test market campaigns based on responses, revenue, and other key metrics. Predict who will respond to which
campaign by which channel, and why. Increase the likelihood of responses and the quality of leads in future campaigns. A different promotion is used at
each location, and the weekly sales of the new item are recorded for the first four weeks.
MarketID
Unique identifier for market (1–10).
Market Size
Size of market area by sales (Small, Medium, Large).
LocationID
Unique identifier for store location.
Age Of Store
Age of store in years (1–28).
Promotion
One of three promotions that was tested (1, 2, 3).
week
One of four weeks when the promotions were run (1–4).
Sales In Thousands
Sales amount for a specific LocationID, Promotion, and week.
Prompt
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
I. Report for Stakeholders: You will write an enterprise-level report about your project. While this critical element is listed first, you will complete it last.
A. Generate an enterprise-level report that will be submitted along with your executive summary. This report should address all the critical
elements below.
B. Compose an executive summary that explains what your process was to create the report, as well as why you performed the actions you did.
Within your summary, provide a detailed description of the report that explains the visualizations used in audience-appropriate language. You
5
will also need to anticipate questions stakeholders may ask, so be sure that your explanation is as detailed as possible but also uses audienceappropriate language.
II. Identify the Business Question: Select a data set and scenario from the provided list and explain how you would solve the business question. Identify
what sort of data you would require in order to solve the question.
III. Making Sense of Data: In this section, you will analyze the data within the spreadsheet in order to understand what information it will provide and its
relation to the business question.
A. Analyze the provided data set and explain what the data is and how the data correlates back to the business question you intend to answer.
B. Identify which areas of data from the spreadsheet you will utilize and why. For example, which columns would you use?
IV. Business Intelligence: In this section, you will explain how Power BI can be used to address business problems.
A. Explain how you plan to address the organization’s business problem using the Power BI analysis tool.
B. Explain how the Power BI analysis tool can influence and affect the audience, such as the stakeholders and coworkers in different areas of the
company. For example, how can the tool be used to convey information?
V. Software Integration: For this section, you will upload your data into Power BI and ensure it has appropriate formatting.
A. Upload into Power BI the selected data set, using the correct data type and fields.
B. Ensure your columns have appropriate formatting by editing your data. For example, ensure that you have formatted your columns with
monetary values as currency.
VI. Guiding Questions: Data relationships are necessary for linking common data or records in tables together to analyze the data and generate meaningful
reports. In this section, you will look at your initial analysis from section III and develop business questions (and answers) that will serve as the focus of
your visualizations.
A. Develop business questions based on your initial analysis that will effectively guide your visualizations.
B. Explain how you will use the compiled and cleaned data to effectively answer the business questions posed based on your initial analysis.
VII. Visualizations: In this section, you will choose appropriate visualizations to display your data.
A. Describe how you chose which particular visualization is best suited for displaying the data.
B. Describe how you know the visualization used is best suited for conveying information to the targeted user audience and their interaction needs
across multifunctional teams.
6
C. Generate visualizations to accurately display your data.
D. Create visual data correlations by integrating additional data into your visualizations.
E. Insert data visualizations into your report and explain what the visualizations represent. Confirm that all of the data that you want displayed is
shown.
VIII. Actionable Insights: Identify actionable insights based on your analysis.