Learning Log: Consider how data analysts

approach tasks

Overview

Earlier you learned about how data analysts at one organization used data to improve employee retention.
Now, you’ll complete an entry in your learning log to track your thinking and reflections about those data
analysts' process and how they approached this problem. By the time you complete this activity, you will
have a stronger understanding of how the six phases of the data analysis process can be used to break
down tasks and tackle big questions. This will help you apply these steps to future analysis tasks and start
tackling big questions yourself.

Review the six phases of data analysis

Before you write your entry in your learning log, reflect on the case study from earlier. The data analysts
wanted to use data to improve employee retention. In order to do that, they had to break this larger
project into manageable tasks. The analysts organized those tasks and activities around the six phases of
the data analysis process:

1. Ask
2. Prepare
3. Process
4. Analyze
5. Share
6. Act
The analysts asked questions to define both the issue to be solved and what would equal a successful
result. Next, they prepared by building a timeline and collecting data with employee surveys that were
designed to be inclusive. They processed the data by cleaning it to make sure it was complete, correct,
relevant, and free of errors and outliers. They analyzed the clean employee survey data. Then the analysts
shared their findings and recommendations with team leaders. Afterward, leadership acted on the results
and focused on improving key areas.

Data and gut instinct

Detectives and data analysts have a lot in common. Both depend on facts and clues to make decisions.
Both collect and look at the evidence. Both talk to people who know part of the story. And both might even
follow some footprints to see where they lead. Whether you’re a detective or a data analyst, your job is all
about following steps to collect and understand facts.

Analysts use data-driven decision-making and follow a step-by-step process. You have learned that there
are six steps to this process:

1. Ask questions and define the problem.

2. Prepare data by collecting and storing the information.
3. Process data by cleaning and checking the information.
4. Analyze data to find patterns, relationships, and trends.
5. Share data with your audience.
6. Act on the data and use the analysis results.
But there are other factors that influence the decision-making process. You may have read mysteries where
the detective used their gut instinct, and followed a hunch that helped them solve the case. Gut instinct is
an intuitive understanding of something with little or no explanation. This isn’t always something
conscious; we often pick up on signals without even realizing. You just have a “feeling” it’s right.

Why gut instinct can be a problem

At the heart of data-driven decision making is data. Therefore, it's essential that data analysts focus on the
data to ensure they make informed decisions. If you ignore data by preferring to make decisions based on
your own experience, your decisions may be biased. But even worse, decisions based on gut instinct
without any data to back them up can cause mistakes.

Consider an example of a restaurant entrepreneur, partnering with a well known chef to develop a new
restaurant in a bustling part of the city’s central shopping district. The well known chef has several
restaurants across the city. Banking on their reputation, the restaurant entrepreneur and chef followed gut
instinct and created another uniquely themed restaurant. However, fundraising efforts fell short to fund
the opening of the restaurant after months of planning and preparation. The property will go back on the
market to be sold at a loss. Had the entrepreneur done more research, they would've found data showing
prospective customers in this new restaurant location were very different from the chef's other
restaurants.

The more you understand the data related to a project, the easier it will be to figure out what is required.
These efforts will also help you identify errors and gaps in your data so you can communicate your findings
more effectively. Sometimes past experience helps you make a connection that no one else would notice.
For example, a detective might be able to crack open a case because they remember an old case just like
the one they’re solving today. It's not just gut instinct.

Data + business knowledge = mystery solved

Blending data with business knowledge, plus maybe a touch of gut instinct, will be a common part of your
process as a junior data analyst. The key is figuring out the exact mix for each particular project. A lot of
times, it will depend on the goals of your analysis. That is why analysts often ask, “How do I define success
for this project?”

In addition, try asking yourself these questions about a project to help find the perfect balance:

 What kind of results are needed?

 Who will be informed?
 Am I answering the question being asked?
 How quickly does a decision need to be made?
For instance, if you are working on a rush project, you might need to rely on your own knowledge and
experience more than usual. There just isn’t enough time to thoroughly analyze all of the available data.
But if you get a project that involves plenty of time and resources, then the best strategy is to be more
data-driven. It’s up to you, the data analyst, to make the best possible choice. You will probably blend data
and knowledge a million different ways over the course of your data analytics career. And the more you
practice, the better you will get at finding that perfect blend.
Origins of the data analysis process
When you decided to join this program, you proved that you are a curious person. So let’s tap into your
curiosity and talk about the origins of data analysis. We don’t fully know when or why the first person
decided to record data about people and things. But we do know it was useful because the idea is still
around today!
We also know that data analysis is rooted in statistics, which has a pretty long history itself. Archaeologists
mark the start of statistics in ancient Egypt with the building of the pyramids. The ancient Egyptians were
masters of organizing data. They documented their calculations and theories on papyri (paper-like
materials), which are now viewed as the earliest examples of spreadsheets and checklists. Today’s data
analysts owe a lot to those brilliant scribes, who helped create a more technical and efficient process.

It is time to enter the data analysis life cycle—the process of going from data to decision. Data goes
through several phases as it gets created, consumed, tested, processed, and reused. With a life cycle
model, all key team members can drive success by planning work both up front and at the end of the data
analysis process. While the data analysis life cycle is well known among experts, there isn't a single defined
structure of those phases. There might not be one single architecture that’s uniformly followed by every
data analysis expert, but there are some shared fundamentals in every data analysis process. This reading
provides an overview of several, starting with the process that forms the foundation of the Google Data
Analytics Certificate.

The process presented as part of the Google Data Analytics Certificate is one that will be valuable to you as
you keep moving forward in your career:

1. Ask: Business Challenge/Objective/Question

2. Prepare: Data generation, collection, storage, and data management
3. Process: Data cleaning/data integrity
4. Analyze: Data exploration, visualization, and analysis
5. Share: Communicating and interpreting results
6. Act: Putting your insights to work to solve the problem
Understanding this process—and all of the iterations that helped make it popular—will be a big part of
guiding your own analysis and your work in this program. Let’s go over a few other variations of the data
analysis life cycle.
EMC's data analysis life cycle
EMC Corporation's data analytics life cycle is cyclical with six steps:

1. Discovery
2. Pre-processing data
3. Model planning
4. Model building
5. Communicate results
6. Operationalize
EMC Corporation is now Dell EMC. This model, created by David Dietrich, reflects the cyclical nature of real-
world projects. The phases aren’t static milestones; each step connects and leads to the next, and
eventually repeats. Key questions help analysts test whether they have accomplished enough to move
forward and ensure that teams have spent enough time on each of the phases and don’t start modeling
before the data is ready. It is a little different from the data analysis life cycle this program is based on, but
it has some core ideas in common: the first phase is interested in discovering and asking questions; data
has to be prepared before it can be analyzed and used; and then findings should be shared and acted on.

For more information, refer to this e-book, Data Science & Big Data Analytics.

SAS's iterative life cycle

An iterative life cycle was created by a company called SAS, a leading data analytics solutions provider. It
can be used to produce repeatable, reliable, and predictive results:

1. Ask
2. Prepare
3. Explore
4. Model
5. Implement
6. Act
7. Evaluate
The SAS model emphasizes the cyclical nature of their model by visualizing it as an infinity symbol. Their
life cycle has seven steps, many of which we have seen in the other models, like Ask, Prepare, Model, and
Act. But this life cycle is also a little different; it includes a step after the act phase designed to help analysts
evaluate their solutions and potentially return to the ask phase again.

For more information, refer to Managing the Analytics Life Cycle for Decisions at Scale.

Project-based data analytics life cycle

A project-based data analytics life cycle has five simple steps:

1. Identifying the problem

2. Designing data requirements
3. Pre-processing data
 4. Performing data analysis
5. Visualizing data
This data analytics project life cycle was developed by Vignesh Prajapati. It doesn’t include the sixth phase,
or what we have been referring to as the Act phase. However, it still covers a lot of the same steps as the life
cycles we have already described. It begins with identifying the problem, preparing and processing data
before analysis, and ends with data visualization.

For more information, refer to Understanding the data analytics project life cycle.

Big data analytics life cycle

Authors Thomas Erl, Wajid Khattak, and Paul Buhler proposed a big data analytics life cycle in their book,
Big Data Fundamentals: Concepts, Drivers & Techniques. Their life cycle suggests phases divided into
nine steps:

1. Business case evaluation

2. Data identification
3. Data acquisition and filtering
4. Data extraction
5. Data validation and cleaning
6. Data aggregation and representation
7. Data analysis
8. Data visualization
9. Utilization of analysis results
This life cycle appears to have three or four more steps than the previous life cycle models. But in reality,
they have just broken down what we have been referring to as Prepare and Process into smaller steps. It
emphasizes the individual tasks required for gathering, preparing, and cleaning data before the analysis
phase.

For more information, refer to Big Data Adoption and Planning Considerations.

Key takeaway
From our journey to the pyramids and data in ancient Egypt to now, the way we analyze data has evolved
(and continues to do so). The data analysis process is like real life architecture, there are different ways to
do things but the same core ideas still appear in each model of the process. Whether you use the structure
of this Google Data Analytics Certificate or one of the many other iterations you have learned about, we are
here to help guide you as you continue on your data journey.