Tackling the Challenge

To complete this challenge, I followed the five-step DVD methodology for data visualization and dashboarding:

1. Understanding the business need

2. Connecting to data sources

3. Modeling the data

4. Visualizing the data

5. Sharing the data visualizations and reports

Understanding the Business Need

We start off every Power BI project with a review of the business need. For this particular contest, defining the need is a bit unique in the sense that we only know what objectives are defined in the contest details. There isn’t necessarily a business problem or issue that needs to be solved or an action or decision that we’re seeking to help drive and inform.

If we combine the contest details and the dataset’s topic, we can define the objective of the report as:

Build a compelling, insightful, and accessible Power BI report that tells a data story, uncover trends, or highlights something unexpected about 10 years of change in technology.

In contests like these, an additional strategy we could use is to review the judging panel (in this case, three data visualization experts) and make educated guesses about what they would want to see in the final report.

From my review of the judging panel, I made a few observations:

• Past judging experience: the judges have past judging experience for activities like Workout Wednesday and the Power BI DataViz World Championships providing us with a potential resource for teasing out what they tend to focus on when reviewing submissions.

From DVD Business Needs Note-Taking tool, the relevant questions and answers are as follows:

• What are the key background and contextual factors driving the BI request?

The Power BI dashboard should tell an insightful data story that leads the viewer through insights about how technology has changed over a 10 year period.

An optional step I often take when dealing with a topic I am unfamiliar with is to spend an hour or two reading about it. In this case, I spent some time perusing the web for articles and content from reputable sources that discuss changes and trends in technology. The purpose of doing this is to get comfortable with the topic. Here are some resources I reviewed:

Resource 1: TBD

Resource 2: TBD

Resource 3: TBD

• What is the primary objective of the Power BI report?

The Power BI dashboard should:

1. provide a comprehensive overview of 10 years of change in technology

2. highlight insights about 10 years of change in technology

3. be visually appealing

4. adhere to accessibility standards

5. be simple and intuitive

• What is in scope?

The key scope limitation of this tasking is the topic and time period for analysis: technology change over a 10 year period. Notably, this 10 year period does not have a minimum start or end year, so we could cover any 10 year period we choose.

• What key questions should the dashboard answer?

• What are the 5-6 key metrics or key performance indicators needed?

• Does a data dictionary exist? If not, should we create one?

• What data sources will feed into the dashboard (e.g., Excel files, CSV, databases)?

• Will any data transformation or cleaning be required?

While attempting to answer these questions, I realized that exploratory data analysis is required to provide answers to some of these questions. In challenges like these, where the contest does not provide a set of key questions to answer, the burden of determining what is important from the dataset rests with us.