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Understanding data analytics project life cycle

By Vignesh Prajapati March 19, 2025 data-analytics

Contents [ hide ]

1 Drowning in Data? Transform Chaos into Strategy in 5 Proven Steps

2 🔍 Step 1: Defining the Business Problem (The North Star of Analytics)
2.1 Why It’s Critical
2.2 How to Nail It
3 🗂️ Step 2: Designing Data Requirements (Building Your Analytics Foundation)
3.1 The Data Blueprint
3.2 Avoid These Pitfalls
4 🧹 Step 3: Preprocessing Data (The Unsung Hero of Analytics)
4.1 Why 80% of Analytics Work Happens Here
4.2 Your Preprocessing Playbook
5 📈 Step 4: Performing Analytics (From Descriptive to Predictive Mastery)
5.1 Data Analytics Life Cycle and Project Examples#
5.1.1 The Analytics Spectrum
6 🎨 Step 5: Visualizing Insights (The Art of Persuasion)
6.1 Principles of Powerful Visuals
7 🚀 From Learning to Earning: Launch Your Data Career
7.1 Your Action Plan
7.2 FAQs
7.3 Share this:
7.4 Like this:

Drowning in Data? Transform Chaos into Strategy

in 5 Proven Steps
Data is the new oil—but only if you refine it. According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are
generated daily, yet 90% of it remains unstructured and unused. Whether you’re a Coursera
student from the “Data Data Everywhere” course or a business leader, this guide unpacks
the data analytics lifecycle with actionable frameworks, real-world examples, and free
resources. Let’s turn raw numbers into ROI. This is the standard data lifecycle which covers
common data stages across data analytics project life cycle, data life cycle, data science life cycle
and data analysis life cycle.
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The data analytics project life cycle stages are seen in the following diagram:

Here are the Important stages:

1. Identifying the right problem statements for your Business Problem

2. Designing the right dataset for the problem statement
3. Start Collecting and Processing the data for your Algorithms or Tools
4. Performing analytics over your data
5. Visualizing the data with analysed output

Let’s get some perspective on these stages for performing data analytics.

🔍 Step 1: Defining the Business Problem (The North

Star of Analytics)

Why It’s Critical

Without a clear problem, even the best data becomes noise. Example:

A retail chain noticed declining sales but didn’t know if the issue was pricing, inventory, or
customer experience.

How to Nail It

1. Ask the 5 Whys:

Why are sales dropping? → High cart abandonment.
Why the abandonment? → Slow checkout process.
2. Align with Business Goals: Use SMART criteria:
Specific: Reduce cart abandonment by 20% in 3 months.
Measurable: Track via Google Analytics.
Achievable: Optimize checkout page load speed.
Relevant: Aligns with revenue growth goals.
Time-bound: 90-day sprint.

Case Study:
Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” began by asking, “How can we keep users engaged with personalized
content?” Result: A 30% increase in user retention.

🗂️ Step 2: Designing Data Requirements

(Building Your Analytics Foundation)
To perform the data analytics for a specific problem, it needs datasets from related domains.
Based on the domain and problem specification, the data source can be decided, and based on

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the problem definition; the data attributes of these datasets can be defined.

Designing Data requirement is one of the important step because with this step we are going to
create virtual environment with data which is representative of the real world for which we are
going to solve the problem. For example, if we are going to perform social media analytics
(problem specification), we use the data source as Facebook or Twitter. For identifyingright data
collection frameowork with the right the data attributes, like – user profile information, likes, and
posts to be utlised for this.

The Data Blueprint

Source Selection:
Web Analytics: Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar.
IoT Devices: Sensors for supply chain tracking.
Attribute Curation:
For an e-commerce site:
User Behavior: Click-through rates, session duration.
Product Metrics: SKU performance, return rates.

Avoid These Pitfalls

Overloading: Collecting irrelevant data (e.g., tracking mouse movements for a pricing
analysis).
Under-Scoping: Missing critical variables (e.g., excluding geographic data for regional sales
trends).

Pro Tip:

“Start small. Pilot with a subset of data before scaling.”

Example:
Netflix’s Recommendation Engine

Data Sources: User watch history, ratings, device type.

Attributes: Genre preferences, binge-watching patterns, time of day.

🧹 Step 3: Preprocessing Data (The Unsung

Hero of Analytics)
In organizations all can not use the same data sources, data attributes for the different use cases,
it has to be different because there are variety of the reasons. The raw data cant be directly used
for the analytics it could result into wrong conclusion hence it can impact to business decisions.
All the required data attributes are coming from variety of data sources and there is dedicated
team which can write applications to collect the data who are not going to use this data in future
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so they don’t care much on the data accuracy until they get the right feedback from the analytics
team. And thats real true.

Unlock the true potential of your data with effective data preprocessing! Dive into the
significance of meticulous cleaning and transformation, essential steps that lay the foundation
for extracting valuable insights and ensuring the success of your data-driven endeavors.

Why 80% of Analytics Work Happens Here

Raw data is messy: duplicates, outliers, and inconsistent formats.

Your Preprocessing Playbook

1. Cleaning:
Missing Data: Use mean/median imputation or predictive modeling.
Duplicates: Apply Python’s Pandas drop_duplicates().
2. Transformation:
Normalization: Scale features (e.g., Min-Max for neural networks).
Aggregation: Applying the timeline/numeric/string/relations based aggregation
features to understand proposional comparision acorss different classes/data
instances.
Enrichment: Deriving Additional Data Attributes from external data sources like
weather, news, market prices, etc…
Encoding: Convert categorical data (one-hot encoding for machine learning).
3. Outlier Detection:
Z-Score/IQR: Flag data points outside ±3 standard deviations.

Case Study:
Airbnb preprocesses 10TB+ of data daily:

Cleaning: Removing duplicate listings.

Transforming: Converting currencies to USD.
Enriching: Adding local event data to pricing models.

📈 Step 4: Performing Analytics (From

Descriptive to Predictive Mastery)
Data Analytics Life Cycle and Project Examples#
Discover projects and life cycle examples, focusing on practical implementations in analytics and
data science.

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Once your data is in the right format, the next step is to perform data analytics operations using
the appropriate tools. These operations are essential for discovering meaningful information
from data that can aid in making better decisions and solving business problems through data
mining concepts. There are two main types of analytics that can be used for business
intelligence: Descriptive Analytics and Predictive Analytics.

The Analytics Spectrum

1. Descriptive Analytics (What Happened?):

Tools: SQL aggregations, Excel pivot tables.
Example: A 15% sales drop in Q2 linked to a website outage.
2. Diagnostic Analytics (Why Did It Happen?):
Tools: Correlation analysis, A/B testing.
Example: The sales dip spiked during the outage period.
3. Predictive Analytics (What’s Next?):
Tools: Python’s Scikit-learn, TensorFlow.
Example: Forecast holiday sales using ARIMA models.
4. Prescriptive Analytics (What Should We Do?):
Tools: Optimization algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations.
Example: Reallocating inventory to high-demand regions.

Real-World Use Case:

Netflix uses predictive analytics to:

Recommend shows (saving $1B/year in retention costs) by showing Personalized

suggestions based on user’s past online interaction
Optimize content budgets (e.g., greenlighting Stranger Things)
Dynamic Pricing – Real-time price adjustments based on demand and inventory
Fraud Detection – AI analyzing transactions to identify and prevent fraud
Personalized Marketing – Targeted ads and emails tailored to your preferences

🎨 Step 5: Visualizing Insights (The Art of

Persuasion)

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Data visualization is a simple and effective way to comprehend data and analyze outcomes,
without the need for complex measurements or analysis. It enables easy exploration of data
based on the chart type used for the specific data type. There are various tools available for data
visualization, including open-source and paid enterprise-level tools. Once you input the data,
select the attributes or columns and define the chart type, you can easily view the distribution of
data.

Data visualization is also crucial for displaying the output of data analytics to business
stakeholders, enabling them to understand the power of data and the results of a data analytics
project in the form of comparisons or distributions. It is an interactive way to represent data
insights, and take appropriate actions on top of that. There are various software tools and R
packages available for data visualization. R has a range of packages specifically designed for
visualizing datasets.

Principles of Powerful Visuals

1. Know Your Audience:

Executives: High-level KPIs (revenue, ROI).
Analysts: Granular trends (week-over-week growth).
2. Choose the Right Chart:
Comparisons: Bar charts (e.g., sales by region).
Trends: Line graphs (e.g., monthly user growth).
Distributions: Histograms (e.g., customer age groups).
3. Tools of the Trade:

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Tableau: Drag-and-drop dashboards.

Power BI: Real-time Azure integrations.
Python: Plotly for interactive web visualizations.

Pro Tip:

“Less is more. Avoid 3D charts or rainbow color palettes—they distort data.”

Example Charts:

Example Dashboard:

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Caption: A sample dashboard for e-commerce analytics, showing sales trends, top products, and
customer demographics.

🚀 From Learning to Earning: Launch Your Data

Career
Congratulations!! on successfully understanding what is Data Analytics project life cycle. Deep
dive into other pages to understand other aspects of Data Analytics. Now, Lets take some actions
to get yourself onboaded with Data Analytics journey. All the best!

Your Action Plan

1. Learn:
Courses: Coursera’s “Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate.”
Books: “Storytelling with Data” by Cole Nussbaumer.
2. Practice:
Kaggle: Compete in challenges (e.g., predicting housing prices).
Side Projects: Analyze public datasets (e.g., WHO health stats).
3. Network:
LinkedIn Groups: Join “Data Science Central” or “AI & Machine Learning.”

Success Story:
Jane, a marketing manager, transitioned to a data analyst role after:

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Completing Coursera’s “Data Data Everywhere” course.

Building a portfolio of Tableau dashboards analyzing Shopify sales data.

FAQs

Q: What’s the difference between data analytics and data science?

A: Analytics focuses on insights; data science builds predictive models.

Q: How long does a data analytics project take?

A: From 2 weeks (simple dashboards) to 6+ months (enterprise ML pipelines).

Q: Which tool is best for beginners?

A: Start with Excel or Google Sheets, then graduate to Python/Power BI.

Next:

Deloitte Data Analytics Virtual Internship – Free Certification Available

About The Author

Vignesh Prajapati

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