MIS $350$ Final Project Guidelines and Rubric

Overview

A data analyst can extract insights and information from data sets. As a data analyst, you can do many different specialized tasks, including analyzing data and reporting on the findings. Those reported findings can help a business make data$-$informed decisions.

In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:

Utilize appropriate tools and techniques for creating business intelligence reports.

Apply business intelligence techniques and practices for making data$-$centered decisions within a business setting.

Recommend appropriate solutions to business problems that address business needs and requirements.

Create data visualizations utilizing appropriate tools and techniques for producing business reports.

Scenario

ABC Company is in competition with many companies that provide the same products and services. A personal touch and strong customer service are standards being set by ABC Company, and this is shaking up the market. To keep up with consumer expectations and initiate new customers from different areas, expansion must take place. For this expansion, the company needs to answer several business questions. Utilizing business intelligence techniques, a business can utilize data to create reports and provide insight into those business questions.

For this project, you will play the role of a data analyst at a consulting company that you own. You will be working directly for the CEO in your investigation of the expansion of this business. You will be asked to evaluate one of seven data sets related to what the company has done up to this point, and you will provide those insights back to the company. For each of these data$-$set areas, you will be asked to use Microsoft Power Business Intelligence $($BI$)$ tools to build a stunning visualization of the data and a written report of the insights that were found in the analysis.

Using the IBM Watson Analytics data, choose ONE of the seven data sets and explore the data for interesting insights, and create dashboards using the Microsoft Power BI tool.

Dataset Deliverables

Create only the deliverables associated with your chosen data set. In order to do so$,$ download the document linked below, navigate to the Dataset Deliverables, and click on the title of the data set to view the data in Excel:

Final Project Guidelines and Rubric

Prompt

Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:

Report for Stakeholders: You will write an enterprise$-$level report about your project. While this critical element is listed first, you will complete it last.

Generate an enterprise$-$level report that will be submitted along with your executive summary. This report should address all the critical elements below.

Compose an executive summary that explains what your process was to create the report, as well as why you performed the actions you did. Within your summary, provide a detailed description of the report that explains the visualizations used in audience$-$appropriate language. You will also need to anticipate questions stakeholders may ask, so be sure that your explanation is as detailed as possible but also uses audience$-$appropriate language.

Identify the Business Question: Select a data set and scenario from the provided list and explain how you would solve the business question. Identify what sort of data you would require in order to solve the question.

Making Sense of Data: In this section, you will analyze the data within the spreadsheet in order to understand what information it will provide and its relation to the business question.

Analyze the provided data set and explain what the data is and how the data correlates back to the business question you intend to answer.

Identify which areas of data from the spreadsheet you will utilize and why. For example, which columns would you use?

Business Intelligence: In this section, you will explain how Power BI can be used to address business problems.

Explain how you plan to address the organization's business problem using the Power BI analysis tool.

Explain how the Power BI analysis tool can influence and affect the audience, such as the stakeholders and coworkers in different areas of the company. For example, how can the tool be used to convey information?

Software Integration: For this section, you will upload your data into Power BI and ensure it has appropriate formatting.

Upload into Power BI the selected data set, using the correct data type and fields.

Ensure your columns have appropriate formatting by editing your data. For example, ensure that you have formatted your columns with monetary values as currency.

Guiding Questions: Data relationships are necessary for linking common data or records in tables together to analyze the data and generate meaningful reports. In this section, you will look at your initial analysis from section III and develop business questions $($and answers$)$ that will serve as the focus