It’s good to be back!
First, thanks to all the participants jumping into Real World Fake Data (RWFD) for Season 2! Hopefully, you find it a worthwhile endeavor for building your analytic skills!
Session 1 was all about HR Attrition. For Season 2 I’ve introduced the idea of requirements, including a color palette and logo. Ideally, you’ll have requirements in the Real World, so it only made sense to try and mimic some of that real-world behavior. The requirements were fairly straightforward; we need to know what factors could be driving attrition and how we can identify potential employees who may leave based on the data.
I’ve got 3 dashboards I want to highlight today, including work from Megha Mrudhul and Josh Hughes.
The first from Megha Mrudhul can be found here. This is a really nice example of an exploratory dashboard. I love the way she used small icons to tell me which charts had additional details in the tooltips and which ones I could use to filter the dashboard by interacting with them. I would note that the icons could have been a little darker as my old eyes had the challenge to see them clearly at first viewing. This dataset had A LOT of data within it, and I loved the way she utilized the tooltip to show the “next level deeper” data points that might not be driving attrition, but they are important to make available to the consumer. It is sometimes hard to now display data that you have, but as an analyst knowing what data to highlight, what data to make available, and what data to exclude is crucial.
The next dashboard comes from Josh Hughes and is available here. Josh went DEEP! Starting with a lovely overview of attrition at the Everest Group, and including a few quick filters to allow us to examine the data by some common attributes. I like how included a Purpose with the dashboard that sets the context as to why the dashboard is here and why you should be using it. Many times we develop dashboards for a stakeholder and not every user is in the room during requirements so having an explanation, or some training on how to use the dashboard can be a game-changer when it comes to adoption.
Drilling down into the different sections he made a design choice that I’ve gone back and forth on, but in my opinion, it works.
Now in the above case, Age is a discrete value and generally, I would say this should be a Bar Chart. Because of his inclusion of the trend line, I think this works well to show as age increases the likelihood of attrition drops. The thing with best practices is that every choice is a compromise or concession. What works in some cases may not work in others, and that is where the influence of the Real World collides with Best Practices.
Above is the final view he created which allows for attrition monitoring and gives us the risk indicators as well as employees that are matching those indicators. This allows for HR, or department managers to see what employees are at risk.
Stellar work all around with this one, well done, Josh!
Session 2 of RWFD is live and we are looking at Financial Statements. Be sure and check out the requirements before you dive in!