A taste of working as different roles in an analytics project

Working as a data analyst in a company, it is common that the analyst would quickly encounter a number of different projects, they could be an individual project, a team project, or even across departments project. As an analyst in the company, people expect the analyst to use common analytics tools to drive and guide future business. They consider the analyst the bridge between the company management group and the data. Common projects may include IT — Focused projects where require the analyst to improve the IT system, Operations Focused projects improving the process flow and updating procedures, and Strategy projects where the analyst could develop A/B Test or Multi-Armed Banit Test using data.[1]

I agree with the above comments and they are all correct. However, what is being missed here, and I think it is a common sense that people usually ignore, is inside an analytics project with a group of analysts, there are several needed roles beyond the “data analyst” to keep everything working and running. They are business contact person, process manager, and project manager. Luckily, in our practicum project, we have routine these roles each quarter and each of us has a taste.

By referencing to Microsoft, their business contact tool records to organize and store lots of information about the people you do business with. Business Contact records can help you keep track of the information you have about the people you do business with.[2] I very much agree with their definition, although my previous working experience has to do with client communication and I am confident that I am one of the professional, I have leveraged my communication skill in this practicum to next level, writing memos of the meeting with our client, sending out clarification emails and addressed the potential misunderstanding via a strong relationship with the business people are common things in daily analyst life. Since analysts frequently need to communicate with different departments to learn insights, excellent communication skills somehow become a strong must-needed soft skill. As far as I know, the business intelligence analyst role at Amazon expects candidates have the ability to write a memo of everything. Therefore, you could expect how important it could be to a professional analyst. In my first quarter, when I worked as a business contact person in our team, I am glad that I took the responsibility of it and accomplish excellent memos of meetings every week, and contacted our client when we had a misalignment to the number of the final deliverables at week 5.

In the remainder of this section, I want to specifically describe how we approach to solve the misalignment problems. In general, provide the logical reason or thought process behind the decision is approachable. People would understand and be persuaded by the logical thought process. A great consult would never oversell his or her result so let the client also understand that.[3] Working slow and deliver only one product would benefit the company than delivering three useless products.

In our practicum project, each week we could have the side-deliverable goals to the client as well as we need to also finish the assignment/paper from the practicum course. With that being said, we create a process manager role to help us track our timeline and oversee our future plan schedule in weeks. It is more a support role in our team rather than a strategy decision role defined by the industry[4]. Shout out to our routine program, I worked as a process manager in my second quarter. In this role, I have expanded my time management skills to support our teammates and provide them a project overflow timeline via Azure DevOps. This tool which is created by Microsoft allows us to assign tasks to individuals and the individual could also report the status of the task via filling the description. This tool not only could visualize the number of tasks status but also reduce the useless check-in status communication between teammates on the slack channel. Furthermore, it allows me to practice to expand the time management skill not only on myself but to the entire team and the overall project.

From time to time, the project manager has been identified as the heat/leader of a project. They are organized, passionate, and goal-oriented who understand what projects have in common, and their strategic role in how organizations succeed, learn and change described by Project Management Institute[5]. In our practicum project, the project manager leads the direction, controls the work pace, motivates people’s emotions as needed, assigns the task to the best-fitted person, and provides a brief meeting each week with our mentors and professors. It works under pressure and requires a person who is comfortable with change and complexity in dynamic environments.[5]

Flashback to my previous job, I had an experience in having a group of 5 people in total and since I was the senior worker in the small group, I acted more often as a guide. This would share a portion of the similarity of being a project manager. In this practicum, I am glad that I have practiced the project manager role in my last quarter. I am confident to lead the topic, assign task, and diagnose potential issues at this point.

In summary, I have shown that there are many roles even in a data analytics project and I am glad that I have the opportunity to work in some of these roles through these ten months. Another takeaway that I want to share is there are more hidden roles under data analyst/business analyst roles, should you take the responsibility and help the team is your choice.

References:

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