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Week 3

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18 views3 pages

Week 3

Uploaded by

essagamer91
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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Activity overview

You have been learning about the role of a data analyst and how to manage, analyze, and
visualize data. Now, you will consider a valuable tool to help you practice structured thinking
and avoid mistakes: a scope-of-work (SOW).

In this activity, you’ll get practical experience developing an SOW document with the help of
a handy template. You will then complete an example SOW for an imaginary project of your
choosing and learn how analysts outline the work they are going to perform. By the time you
complete this activity, you will be familiar with an essential, industry-standard tool, and gain
comfort asking the right questions to develop an SOW.

Before you get started, take a minute to think about the main ideas, goals, and target
audiences of SOW documents.

Scope of work: What you need to know

As a data analyst, it’s hard to overstate the importance of an SOW document. A well-defined
SOW keeps you, your team, and everyone involved with a project on the same page. It
ensures that all contributors, sponsors, and stakeholders share the same understanding of
the relevant details.

Why do you need an SOW?

The point of data analysis projects is to complete business tasks that are useful to the
stakeholders. Creating an SOW helps to make sure that everyone involved, from analysts and
engineers to managers and stakeholders, shares the understanding of what those business
goals are, and the plan for accomplishing them.

Clarifying requirements and setting expectations are two of the most important parts of a
project. Recall the first phase of the Data Analysis Process—asking questions.
As you ask more and more questions to clarify requirements, goals, data sources,
stakeholders, and any other relevant info, an SOW helps you formalize it all by recording all
the answers and details. In this context, the word “ask” means two things. Preparing to write
an SOW is about asking questions to learn the necessary information about the project, but
it’s also about clarifying and defining what you’re being asked to accomplish, and what the
limits or boundaries of the “ask” are. After all, if you can’t make a distinction between the
business questions you are and aren’t responsible for answering, then it’s hard to know what
success means!

What is a good SOW?

There’s no standard format for an SOW. They may differ significantly from one organization
to another, or from project to project. However, they all have a few foundational pieces of
content in common.

Deliverables: What work is being done, and what things are being created as a result of this
project? When the project is complete, what are you expected to deliver to the stakeholders?
Be specific here. Will you collect data for this project? How much, or for how long?

Avoid vague statements. For example, “fixing traffic problems” doesn’t specify the scope. This
could mean anything from filling in a few potholes to building a new overpass. Be specific!
Use numbers and aim for hard, measurable goals and objectives. For example: “Identify top
10 issues with traffic patterns within the city limits, and identify the top 3 solutions that are
most cost-effective for reducing traffic congestion.”

Milestones: This is closely related to your timeline. What are the major milestones for
progress in your project? How do you know when a given part of the project is considered
complete?

Milestones can be identified by you, by stakeholders, or by other team members such as the
Project Manager. Smaller examples might include incremental steps in a larger project like
“Collect and process 50% of required data (100 survey responses)”, but may also be larger
examples like ”complete initial data analysis report” or “deliver completed dashboard
visualizations and analysis reports to stakeholders”.
Timeline: Your timeline will be closely tied to the milestones you create for your project. The
timeline is a way of mapping expectations for how long each step of the process should take.
The timeline should be specific enough to help all involved decide if a project is on schedule.
When will the deliverables be completed? How long do you expect the project will take to
complete? If all goes as planned, how long do you expect each component of the project will
take? When can we expect to reach each milestone?

Reports: Good SOWs also set boundaries for how and when you’ll give status updates to
stakeholders. How will you communicate progress with stakeholders and sponsors, and how
often? Will progress be reported weekly? Monthly? When milestones are completed? What
information will status reports contain?

At a minimum, any SOW should answer all the relevant questions in the above areas. Note
that these areas may differ depending on the project. But at their core, the SOW document
should always serve the same purpose by containing information that is specific, relevant,
and accurate. If something changes in the project, yo

Context can turn raw data into meaningful information. It is very important for data analysts
to contextualize their data. This means giving the data perspective by defining it. To do this,
you need to identify:

Who: The person or organization that created, collected, and/or funded the data collection
What: The things in the world that data could have an impact on
Where: The origin of the data
When: The time when the data was created or collected
Why: The motivation behind the creation or collection
How: The method used to create or collect it

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