How to find data analytics projects at your company
So you finally got a job as a Data Analyst and so far the only thing you’ve been asked to do is “go analyze” or something vague like that.
Or you want to get more experience in analytics but it’s not officially part of your job.
How can you find data analytics projects to do?
Learn the business
Familiarize yourself with the available data
Figure to how to use your skills to marry those two things above to create value
Ok, so what does that really look like?
Learn the business
What is the purpose of your company?
How do they make money?
What are their goals?
What’s their value proposition?
How do they measure success?
If you can’t answer those questions, start doing some research.
Dig into your company’s resources.
What do they post externally? How do they talk about themselves? Listen to the most recent earnings call (if it’s a public company) or read the latest annual report.
What do they post internally on the company intranet? What’s in their strategic plan or annual goals? What do the CEO and other executives talk about during employee Town Hall or All Hands meetings?
Talk to your colleagues.
Ask your boss/team lead/department head what are their goals for the team. How do you provide value and impact?
Talk to the teams or stakeholders that you support and ask what is important to them.
Familiarize yourself with data
Figure out what is available for you to use. If there is a data lake or better yet, a data dictionary, poke through it to see what’s there. See if you can find previous analyses that have been done and review them. What data did they analyze? What results did they report?
Figure out what numbers are important to the business. If there are existing dashboards or reports used by leadership, look through them. What metrics are they reporting? How are those metrics defined?
Understand how the teams you support are currently using data. What are they looking at or reporting? Ask them how they measure success or would like to measure it. Even if that isn’t a quantifiable metric it can help you figure out ways to quantify their success.
Create value with data
Now comes the hard part - or what you were hired to do, if you’re a Data Analyst. Figure out how to use your skills to take the data available and create business value.
Start with exploratory data analysis. The data that is used for company or team success metrics - what does it look like? How much data is available? Is there seasonality? How do different segments compare - such as categories of users, or product types, or geographic areas, or whatever is relevant to your business?
How are success metrics calculated or aggregated? If something is calculated as a relationship between more than one data point - explore those individual data points. Also understand how data is aggregated - is it raw hits or transactions? Aggregated by user? Or by day/week/month?
Refer back to the problems or questions from the teams you support - what data can answer those? Start exploring that data. What can you learn? And can you start answering their questions or solving their problems?
What should be automated? Are there metrics that are reported regularly? How do they get that data? If it’s not automated, can you automate it? (Usually in a dashboard but maybe a proper data table is also needed.) Are there other relevant things you can automate - for example, join the data with other tables to add more useful columns, add a way to filter and/or compare data, or show how the data trends over time.
If you are ready for the next level or have run out of ideas exploring the above - start anticipating their questions or problems. What else do you think they would care about if they knew what was possible in terms of data availability or analysis or automation methods? Brainstorm possible solutions. What data would you use? How would you use it? And more importantly, what is the value or potential impact of such a project? If you think there is value, start outlining a project plan.
If you’ve been in a similar role, how did you find impactful data projects?