BUSINESS SKILLS MASTER CLASSES FOR DATA SCIENTISTS & ANALYTIC PROFESSIONALS
Two days, two skills core to delivering business value:
Storytelling with Data (Visual and Oral Communication) and Organizing & Managing Analytic Projects.
Together, these two skills will greatly increase your ability to align with a wide range of stakeholders and to deliver analytics projects that bring significant business impact.
Day 1: Storytelling with Data
It’s critical that you are able to clearly craft and deliver a story that helps your audience understand and get excited about the work you’ve been doing. This skill will win support for your project, and it will enhance your career.
Nearly every analytic professional I’ve worked with has at some point in their career consistently produced really awful charts. Not only are the visuals confusing, but analyst themselves haven’t decided what they really want to communicate. It’s too bad that we spend months doing great work but then drop the ball when we try to show this great work to our colleagues.
This training day is not about how to make more elaborate or complicated graphs. It’s quite the opposite. It’s about the skill of crafting your graphics to be as simple and straightforward as possible, with the goal of communicating your most important messages as quickly and intuitively as possible and with minimal visual distraction.
Day 2: Organizing & Managing Analytic Projects
Your odds of bringing an analytics project to successful completion will increase greatly if you start out right. This mean first systematically scoping key elements with your primary stakeholder — goals, targets, expectations, risks, resources — and then bringing all of the relevant participants together in a well-planned and carefully executed launch phase.
As you execute the project, you’ll work with specialized tooling and management frameworks which may or may not be unique to your team. But regardless of tooling and process, you’ll need to continue to carefully manage your stakeholders, keeping communication lines open, navigating delays and setbacks, and escalating when those on whom you depend are not meeting their obligations.
And later, after you’ve already started demonstrating business value, you’ll need to continue to update your models, keep communication lines open, and look out for things like data drift and model drift.
Description
We explain principles and methods that are key to oral and visual presentations, discussing both how to clarify your message, which is easy in principle but difficult in practice, and also the techniques for producing clear slides, graphs and tables.
We’ll go into detail on how to declutter and how to keep control of where you audience is focusing, leveraging principles such as Gestalt, preattentive processing, and visual hierarchies. The material here is perhaps the most immediately relevant for many analytics professionals and will provide very quick wins, as I’ve seen from the responses of my training participants.
After covering basic presentations, we’ll talk about special considerations for dashboard design and for live presentations.
Description
This module covers the key stages of scoping and executing data and analytics projects. This is especially critical due to the inherent uncertainty involved in this highly innovative field.
We start by discussing in detail how to align on goals, expectations and resources at the very beginning of the project, and then describe the importance of and process behind kickoff meetings. We focus on stakeholder alignment, not only at the beginning stages but also on keeping alignment throughout the project and dealing with complications such as delays and setbacks.
We’ll touch on common tooling and frameworks, and how these can help along the way, and we’ll zoom out to see the big picture of product lifecycle, which starts with business goals and ends with ML ops, model updates, and communicating your success stories.
Day 1 Topics
- Core Tooling for Presenting Analytic Insights
- Matching Format to Audience and Purpose
- Increasing Signal to Noise Ratio
- Reducing Cognitive Load
- Gestalt Principles
- Pre-attentive Attributes
- Visual Hierarchies
- Sharpening and Controlling Slide Messaging
- Elevator Pitches (3-minute stories)
- Explaining Technical Concepts to Non-Technical Audiences
- Dashboarding – Principles and Techniques
- Oral Presentations – Preparation and Delivery
- Hands-on Practice
Day 2 Topics
- Situational Assessment
- Data Landscape Canvasing
- Risk Assessment
- Clarification of Business Goals, Definitions of Success and KPIs
- Communicating for Success
- Setting Expectations
- Securing Resources
- RASCI Methodology
- Responsible AI
- Project Tooling and Management Frameworks
- Diverse Organizational Perspectives and Priorities
- Planning and Running Kickoff Meetings
- Managing Stakeholders (maintaining trust, escalating, etc.)
- Staffing Across the Product Lifecycle
- Case Studies
Investment
1900 Eur (Single days may be booked at 990, all prices excluding VAT). Group discounts available.
Contact me regarding discounts for freelancers and non-profit organizations.
Dates:
March 14 & 15
Location:
BCN Amsterdam Arena
Email trainings@dsianalytics.com to reserve your spot.
Feedback from past participants
Trainings given by the author of Business Skills for Data Scientists, Practical Guidance in Six Key Topics