I had the opportunity this week to shadow Hannah Bartholomew, and learn about what a DS Consultant does on a day to day basis when on placement.
Before
I researched the company that Hannah is working at, and the previous reflective logs that were available on Convo, including some of the current pieces of work she is busy with at the client. Based on the current work and technical software being used [SQL and Tableau], I formulated some questions to ask throughout the day in order to gain better insight not only about how SQL was being used, but how to engage with stakeholders.
On the day
We began with Hannah providing on overview of what the business does, and how the process of the renting out of assets to clients works. Through explaining the structure of the SQL Tables and Views, I had a better understanding of how the process works from being out in the wild and scanning RFID codes, to then seeing how it would be recorded for a business and then used in a Tableau dashboard for visualisation. This helped me gain an understanding not only about how the company operations work, but also where Hannah fits in with the business (she's the only Tableau Administrator at the business, so it proved useful learning about how someone manages the Tableau Cloud side of the job, not only dashboard building).
I was assigned some questions to research and answer from Hannah that were a mix of Tableau, Cloud and SQL to work through that were some of the pieces she had to learn along the way in this role. This proved informative in understanding not only some of the pieces integral to the work that Hannah performs in her role, but also some of the pieces coming up soon in my own training (SQL next week!). I then walked through performing these actions on the software to reinforce my learning. I had the chance to help scope some apps for the Slack Channel in order to collect data into a single file that could be used outside of the Slack environment.
I had the opportunity to sit in on 2 meetings. One was a daily scrum with herself and the data engineering team, including who she reports to. It was interesting to see how quickly each of them spoke about what they aimed to complete in the day, as well as bring up some of the pieces that may need to be checked on during the day. It reminded me of the stand ups during client projects, but more efficient. The second meeting was with one of the core consultants Zak Saucede, discussing a new request of stakeholder for a visualisation on assets. It proved useful to see how I can go about bouncing ideas off of others when I'm on placement, especially when requiring advice from a member of the Core Consulting team.
Reflections
It was helpful to see how varied an experience the tasks a Data School Consultant may have on placement. In Hannah's case, being in charge of not only creating dashboards to inform different decisions at the company, but acting as the Tableau Administrator on top of this shows that even once training stops, there is plenty new to learn on placement. Having communication channels set up with those you work with regularly is very important, as Hannah demonstrated with the importance of liaising with the head of the data engineering team, the only main contact for SQL database questions at the firm. Hannah has demonstrated that when you are able to gain the trust of the client, the opportunities available to impact a business, making your presence felt and valued only increases as time goes. With this insight, I am in a better position for how I want to go about approaching stakeholder interaction on placement, and how I navigate balancing different objectives.