Data analysts don’t just build Dashboards!
If you think data analysts just build and maintain dashboards, then you’re WRONG!
Misconceptions!
If you are exploring or trying to get into the data analyst role, most probably you would have a perception that you’ll be building dashboards day in, day out. I can understand why this perception has been created.
Data analytics is one of the hottest roles in the job market recently, and there are a plethora of courses being created and sold to help individuals upskill themselves and get into data analytics. Most of these courses are marketed by showing fancy dashboards to attract viewers and hence it’s made to believe that data analysts just build dashboards.
In reality, it’s not the actual scenario. You will be doing much more than just building dashboards and in this article, I’d like to give a brief glimpse about the same.
Ad hoc vs Continuous monitoring requests
There are generally two types of requests that the business teams will raise with the data teams:
- Ad hoc requests
- Continuous monitoring requests
Ad hoc requests
These are sudden requests raised by the business teams to answer certain questions that may arise due to some business events/scenarios.
“Why did the sales in the Northern region drop in the last month?”
“What are the inventory levels in the ABC warehouse right now?”
These are some ad hoc requests which may come to your table. In such scenarios, you need not go build dashboards whenever such a request is raised.
Instead, you will simply pull the relevant data, apply the transformations and analyze the limited amount of data to answer those queries.
You can simply achieve this using MS-Excel and present the results to the business team. It usually takes 2–5 days to service these kinds of ad hoc requests.
Continuous monitoring requests
These are requests where the business teams would want to monitor certain KPIs at regular intervals (daily, weekly, etc.)
In such scenarios, you would need to build proper self-service dashboards, so that the business teams can do the analysis using the dashboard and need not reach out to data teams with ad hoc queries related to those KPIs. This is where all your dashboarding skills, from requirement gathering to deployment, are required.
These kinds of requests would need multiple approvals as the time needed to service such requests could be anywhere between 2 weeks to a few months.
You need to note that if a certain query is raised at regular intervals as ad hoc requests, you may go ahead and build a dashboard, so that the entire querying process is automated.
Conclusion
Thus, as a data analyst, you should be able to differentiate between ad hoc requests and dashboarding requests, so that you can properly allocate your time and resources to get your job done!
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