Case Study: New data perspectives

The six steps of the data analysis process that you have been learning in this program are: ask,
prepare, process, analyze, share, and act. These six steps apply to any data analysis.
Continue reading to learn how a team of people analysts used these six steps to answer a
business question.

An organization was experiencing a high turnover rate among new hires. Many employees left
the company before the end of their first year on the job. The analysts used the data analysis
process to answer the following question: how can the organization improve the retention rate
for new employees?

First up, the analysts needed to define what the project would look like and what
would qualify as a successful result. So, to determine these things, they asked
effective questions and collaborated with leaders and managers who were
interested in the outcome of their people analysis. These were the kinds of
questions they asked:
What do you think new employees need to learn to be successful in their first year on
the job?
ASK
Have you gathered data from new employees before? If so, may we have access to
the historical data?
Do you believe managers with higher retention rates offer new employees something
extra or unique?
What do you suspect is a leading cause of dissatisfaction among new employees?
By what percentage would you like employee retention to increase in the next fiscal
year?

It all started with solid preparation. The group built a timeline of three months
and decided how they wanted to relay their progress to interested parties. Also
during this step, the analysts identified what data they needed to achieve the
successful result they identified in the previous step - in this case, the analysts
chose to gather the data from an online survey of new employees. These were the
things they did to prepare:
They developed specific questions to ask about employee satisfaction with different
PREPA
business processes, such as hiring and onboarding, and their overall compensation.
RE
They established rules for who would have access to the data collected - in this case,
anyone outside the group wouldn't have access to the raw data, but could view
summarized or aggregated data. For example, an individual's compensation wouldn't
be available, but salary ranges for groups of individuals would be viewable.
They finalized what specific information would be gathered, and how best to present
the data visually. The analysts brainstormed possible project- and data-related issues
and how to avoid them.
 The group sent the survey out. Great analysts know how to respect both their
data and the people who provide it. Since employees provided the data, it was
important to make sure all employees gave their consent to participate. The data
analysts also made sure employees understood how their data would be
collected, stored, managed, and protected. Collecting and using data ethically is
PROCE one of the responsibilities of data analysts. In order to maintain confidentiality
SS and protect and store the data effectively, these were the steps they took:
They restricted access to the data to a limited number of analysts.
They cleaned the data to make sure it was complete, correct, and relevant. Certain
data was aggregated and summarized without revealing individual responses.
They uploaded raw data to an internal data warehouse for an additional layer of
security.

Then, the analysts did what they do best: analyze! From the completed surveys,
the data analysts discovered that an employee’s experience with certain
processes was a key indicator of overall job satisfaction. These were their
findings:
Employees who experienced a long and complicated hiring process were most likely to
ANALY
leave the company.
ZE
Employees who experienced an efficient and transparent evaluation and feedback
process were most likely to remain with the company.
The group knew it was important to document exactly what they found in the analysis,
no matter what the results. To do otherwise would diminish trust in the survey process
and reduce their ability to collect truthful data from employees in the future.

Just as they made sure the data was carefully protected, the analysts were also
careful sharing the report. This is how they shared their findings:
They shared the report with managers who met or exceeded the minimum number of
direct reports with submitted responses to the survey.
SHARE They presented the results to the managers to make sure they had the full picture.
They asked the managers to personally deliver the results to their teams.
This process gave managers an opportunity to communicate the results with the right
context. As a result, they could have productive team conversations about next steps
to improve employee engagement.

The last stage of the process for the team of analysts was to work with leaders
within their company and decide how best to implement changes and take
actions based on the findings. These were their recommendations:
Standardize the hiring and evaluation process for employees based on the most
ACT efficient and transparent practices.
Conduct the same survey annually and compare results with those from the previous
year.
 A year later, the same survey was distributed to employees. Analysts anticipated that
a comparison between the two sets of results would indicate that the action plan
worked. Turns out, the changes improved the retention rate for new employees and the
actions taken by leaders were successful!

Dimensions of data analytics

Now, data science, the discipline of making data useful, is an umbrella term that
encompasses three disciplines: machine learning, statistics, and analytics. These are
separated by how many decisions you know you want to make before you begin with
them.

If you want to make a few important decisions under uncertainty, that is statistics.
- The excellence of statistics is rigor.
- Statisticians are essentially philosophers, epistemologists. They are very, very
careful about protecting decision-makers from coming to the wrong conclusion.

If you want to automate, in other words, make many, many, many decisions under
uncertainty, that is machine learning and AI.
- Performance is the excellence of the machine learning and AI engineer.
- You know that's the one for you if someone says to you, "I bet that you couldn't
build an automation system that performs this task with 99.99999 percent
accuracy," and your response to that is, "Watch me."

But what if you don't know how many decisions you want to make before you begin?
What if what you're looking for is inspiration? You want to encounter your unknown
unknowns. You want to understand your world. That is analytics.
- The excellence of an analyst is speed.
- How quickly can you surf through vast amounts of data to explore it and
discover the gems, the beautiful potential insights that are worth knowing about
and bringing to your decision-makers?
- Are you excited by the ambiguity of exploration?
- Are you excited by the idea of working on a lot of different things, looking at a
lot of different data sources, and thinking through vast amounts of information,
while promising not to snooze past the important potential insights?
- Are you okay being told, "Here is a whole lot of data. No one has looked at it
before. Go find something interesting"? Do you thrive on creative, open-ended
projects?
What is the data ecosystem?
As another example, let's think about a data ecosystem used by a human resources
department. This ecosystem would include information like postings from job websites,
stats on the current labor market, employment rates, and social media data on
prospective employees. => A data analyst could use this information to help their team
recruit new workers and improve employee engagement and retention rates.

But data ecosystems aren't just for stores and offices. They work on farms, too.
Agricultural companies regularly use data ecosystems that include information
including geological patterns in weather movements. Data analysts can use this data to
help farmers predict crop yields.

Some common misconceptions you might come across.

First is the difference between data scientists and data analysts.

It's easy to confuse the two, but what they do is actually very different.
- Data science is defined as creating new ways of modeling and understanding
the unknown by using raw data.
- Data scientists create new questions using data, while analysts find answers to
existing questions by creating insights from data sources.

For example, data analysis and data analytics sound the same, but they're actually
very different things.
- You've already learned that data analysis is the collection, transformation, and
organization of data in order to draw conclusions, make predictions, and drive
informed decision-making.
- Data analytics in the simplest terms is the science of data. It's a very broad
concept that encompasses everything from the job of managing and using data
to the tools and methods that data workers use each and every day.
- So when you think about data, data analysis and the data ecosystem, it's
important to understand that all of these things fit under the data analytics
umbrella.