A small blog on how to tackle Dashboard week at DSDU.
Now that the Christmas vacations had been thoroughly ‘vacationed’, we were greeted by the much coveted ‘Dashboard Week’ (DW). The 3 syllables that has struck fears into the heart of every DS Cohort (At least the first day). This is a small blog on how to tackle Dashboard Week (DW).
- Purpose: The first step to survival is understanding the purpose of DW. The whole purpose of conducting DW is to get the Cohort used to time boxing the subtasks. And, to have a first hand understanding tight deadline deliverables.
- MVP, MVP, MVP: Keep things concise, just enough to tell your story. The goal is to be able to have a dashboard within the evening with a few observations and a blog.
- Keep it simple : Do NOT unnecessarily complicate things. The aim is to get your dashboard to tell a story with getting as close to the best practices as you possibly can.
- Break the habit : The data isn’t always clean, and we love clean data. How much time you spend cleaning the data is partly dependent on the story your dashboard will tell. A simpler story required less cleaning… usually. Don’t be afraid to drop a few rows.
- Try new things : If Points no. 3 and 4 save you any time, don’t be afraid to try some new visual and live ‘dangerously‘
- The big Takeaway : Don’t be disappointed if your dashboard didn’t live up-to your expectations. The takeaway is that the DW is a great way to overcome presentation panics if you’ve got any. And, by Friday the whole Cohort is more confident than the beginning of the week.
- Teamwork : Don’t be afraid to share ideas with others in the Cohort because you can get farther together.
So, here it is. My survival tips for the DW.