Having completed 7 weeks and 2 client projects in The Data School, our cohort – DSAU11 has had a feel for what client placements and most of
our careers are going to be like in our foreseeable future. Below are my experiences from first 2 client projects.
The Week:
The week started off with a retrospective session on our previous client project. In this, each of us get a chance to point out the positives and
areas the need improvement. This was followed by out first client meeting. Our previous client was one of Australia’s major small loans company.
After an thorough introduction to the business and client’s requirements, we had a chance to ask questions to get few doubts out of our way.
The Data:
We were given access to 15 tables stored remotely on Amazon Redshift server. Upon accessing, the very first task was to make sense the data
and figure out how the tables were connected to each other. This took up about 15-20% of our allotted time. The second major task was to
figure out the parameters that quantified the KPIs. This required a detailed understanding of a part of our client’s business model about 50%
of the allotted time and multiple interactions with the client.
The Workflows and Dashboards:
Once the associations between tables were understood, the next part was to connect the required tables and see what the numbers said. While the numbers
made sense for the most bit a significant part of it was gibberish. Exploring the data further let us to see why few numbers appeared unreal. While most
of our data wrangling was carried out in Alteryx a fair bit used SQL.
The Presentation:
D-Day, Friday. With just a few more hours to go, this is the time when we’d seek feedbacks and have a dry run on our presentations. This gave an
opportunity to time bucket all 9 presentations. Also, any minor glitches and alterations to the dashboards and workflows were addressed. Before
the actual presentation, our presenting orders were sorted out. This ensured a well coordinated presentation.
Once everyone had presented their bits, we hang around for a bit for a team chat before calling the week off.
