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W1..well Aligned Objectives and Data

The document discusses how well-aligned data and objectives can lead to accurate conclusions. It provides examples of analysts ensuring data is clean and relevant to objectives like identifying companies with many webinar attendees or determining optimal tutoring hours. Additional variables may be identified that require constraints to better align data to objectives, like only analyzing students with consistent tutoring schedules. Clean data, alignment to objectives, and addressing new variables through constraints can help analysts accurately address business needs.

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70 views5 pages

W1..well Aligned Objectives and Data

The document discusses how well-aligned data and objectives can lead to accurate conclusions. It provides examples of analysts ensuring data is clean and relevant to objectives like identifying companies with many webinar attendees or determining optimal tutoring hours. Additional variables may be identified that require constraints to better align data to objectives, like only analyzing students with consistent tutoring schedules. Clean data, alignment to objectives, and addressing new variables through constraints can help analysts accurately address business needs.

Uploaded by

Shiv
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Well-aligned objectives and data

You can gain powerful insights and make accurate conclusions when data is well-
aligned to business objectives. As a data analyst, alignment is something you will
need to judge. Good alignment means that the data is relevant and can help you
solve a business problem or determine a course of action to achieve a given
business objective.

In this reading, you will review the business objectives associated with three
scenarios. You will explore how clean data and well-aligned business objectives can
help you come up with accurate conclusions. On top of that, you will learn how new
variables discovered during data analysis can cause you to set up data constraints
so you can keep the data aligned to a business objective.  

Clean data + alignment to business objective = accurate


conclusions
Business objective
Account managers at Impress Me, an online content subscription service, want to
know how soon users view content after their subscriptions are activated. 

To start off, the data analyst verifies that the data exported to spreadsheets is clean
and confirms that the data needed (when users access content) is available.
Knowing this, the analyst decides there is good alignment of the data to the business
objective. All that is missing is figuring out exactly how long it takes each user to
view content after their subscription has been activated.

Here are the data processing steps the analyst takes for a user from an account
called V&L Consulting. (These steps would be repeated for each subscribing
account, and for each user associated with that account.)

Step 1
Data-processing step Source
Look up the activation date for V&L Consulting Accou
Relevant data in spreadsheet:
Result: October 21, 2019

Step 2
Data-processing step Source
Look up the name of a user belonging to the V&L Consulting account Accou
Relevant data in spreadsheet:

Result: Maria Ballantyne

Step 3
Data-processing step Source of data
Find the first content access date for Maria B. Content usage
Relevant data in spreadsheet:

Result: October 31, 2019

Step 4
Data-processing step S
Calculate the time between activation and first content usage for Maria B. N
Relevant data in spreadsheet:

Result: 10 days
Pro tip 1
In the above process, the analyst could use VLOOKUP to look up the data in Steps
1, 2, and 3 to populate the values in the spreadsheet in Step 4. VLOOKUP is a
spreadsheet function that searches for a certain value in a column to return a related
piece of information. Using VLOOKUP can save a lot of time; without it, you have to
look up dates and names manually.

Refer to the VLOOKUP page in the Google Help Center for how to use the function
in Google Sheets.

Pro tip 2
In Step 4 of the above process, the analyst could use the DATEDIF function to
automatically calculate the difference between the dates in column C and column D.
The function can calculate the number of days between two dates. 

Refer to the Microsoft Support DATEDIF page for how to use the function in Excel.
The DAYS360 function does the same thing in accounting spreadsheets that use a
360-day year (twelve 30-day months).

Refer to the DATEDIF page in the Google Help Center for how to use the function in
Google Sheets.

Alignment to business objective + additional data


cleaning = accurate conclusions 

Business objective
Cloud Gate, a software company, recently hosted a series of public webinars as free
product introductions. The data analyst and webinar program manager want to
identify companies that had five or more people attend these sessions. They want to
give this list of companies to sales managers who can follow up for potential sales.  

The webinar attendance data includes the fields and data shown below.

Name <First name> <Last name> This was required information atte
Email Address xxxxx@company.com This was required information atte
Name <First name> <Last name> This was required information atte
Company <Company name> This was optional information atte

Data cleaning
The webinar attendance data seems to align with the business objective. But the
data analyst and program manager decide that some data cleaning is needed before
the analysis. They think data cleaning is required because:

 The company name wasn’t a mandatory field. If the company name is


blank, it might be found from the email address. For example, if the email
address is username@google.com, the company field could be filled in
with Google for the data analysis. This data cleaning step assumes that
people with company-assigned email addresses attended a webinar for
business purposes.
 Attendees could enter any name. Since attendance across a series of
webinars is being looked at, they need to validate names against unique
email addresses. For example, if Joe Cox attended two webinars but
signed in as Joe Cox for one and Joseph Cox for the other, he would be
counted as two different people. To prevent this, they need to check his
unique email address to determine that he was the same person. After
the validation, Joseph Cox could be changed to Joe Cox to match the
other instance.

Alignment to business objective + newly discovered


variables + constraints = accurate conclusions 

Business objective
An after-school tutoring company, A+ Education,  wants to know if there is a
minimum number of tutoring hours needed before students have at least a 10%
improvement in their assessment scores.

The data analyst thinks there is good alignment between the data available and the
business objective because:
 Students log in and out of a system for each tutoring session, and the
number of hours is tracked
 Assessment scores are regularly recorded  

Data constraints for new variables


After looking at the data, the data analyst discovers that there are other variables to
consider. Some students had consistent weekly sessions while other students had
scheduled sessions more randomly even though their total number of tutoring hours
was the same. The data doesn’t align as well with the original business objective as
first thought, so the analyst adds a data constraint to focus only on the students with
consistent weekly sessions. This modification helps to get a more accurate picture
about the enrollment time needed to achieve a 10% improvement in assessment
scores. 

Key takeaways
Hopefully these examples give you a sense of what to look for to know if your data
aligns with your business objective. 

 When there is clean data and good alignment, you can get accurate
insights and make conclusions the data supports.
 If there is good alignment but the data needs to be cleaned, clean the
data before you perform your analysis. 
 If the data only partially aligns with an objective, think about how you
could modify the objective, or use data constraints to make sure that the
subset of data better aligns with the business objective.

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