How to initiate the first analytics project after new onboarding or new transfer?
This article is writing to the following analyst roles:
- You are a green hand in the analytics filed with technical skills
- You just transfer to another role and are in charge of a bigger scope (e.g. cross teams, cross countries, cross regions). As we all know the hard skills are basics for an analyst, the communication capabilities and the ability to cooperate across teams are things more important. Now let us start our topics.
To study domain knowledge
Every analytics starts with business understanding which includes product characteristics, life cycles, channels, business models, limitations, etc…We all believe a principle that we can only improve our business only if we understand our business and its weakness. Getting familiar with the business can also help you describe and explain raw data and trends, besides it brings you to the same page with stakeholders and communicate with them in the same languages.
To understand data sources
Identifying project goals is the first step of any analytics projects, understanding what kind of data we have in the organization and who own data is the second step we need to confirm with. For example, you may have data from different ERP systems, databases, excel sheets, voice data, etc… At the general company, we don’t have existing data lakes or data warehouse, we might need to understand who own data and where is the data and then grand access to different systems to pull out data. It is also a good chance to let you know stakeholders and build a connection with them during this process.
To attend periodical meetings
Except for raw data, each team has its reports. The team might have existing data or a specific way to see the business trend, you need to understand it and to leverage current resources. Why? Because if you use different definitions or calculation bases, you will be spending tons of time validating data and explain the discrepancy for the same indicator between different definitions or calculations. Another reason you should attend meetings is that you can keep the transparency with other teams and understand what kind of projects are ongoing and in which you can leverage the resources.
To get familiar with the domain knowledge, understand raw data, and attend cross-functions meetings could help data analysts accelerate the adopting process and give the necessary supports to data analysis projects.
