Tableau Control Charts - Resetting Control Limits and Signals for Process Changes

1st off...Kudos to Ben Jones of Tableau for his work and his willingness to share his own knowledge on how to build process control charts using Tableau Desktop. This is something my 6 sigma leaders wanted badly and it's not an out-of-the-box option with Tableau...yet.

Here's the links to a few of the blogs Ben has written on the topic:

http://dataremixed.com/2011/09/tom-brady-and-control-charts-with-tableau

http://dataremixed.com/2011/10/how-to-make-control-charts-with-tableau

https://public.tableau.com/s/blog/2013/how-to-make-control-charts-tableau

(ALSO CHECK OUT BEN'S BOOK: Communicating Data With Tableau

Notice that there is an outlier on the right portion of this viz that falls within the LCL. This raised a red flag (or dot...haha). After a bunch of comparing some rather lengthy calculations, we came to the conclusion that the table calculations needed to be "computed using Pane Across" rather than the default "Window Across:"

This step will ensure that your LCL, UCL & Signals calculations will reset at each pane as shown below for this example...no more red alert:

In all honesty, I never could get Ben's dashboard to break. As I look closer, Ben was most likely able to accomplish the same by using "Compute at Date". Not sure which will work for you, but I wanted to be put this out there in case you run into something similar.

Cheers!

Kevin Taylor

It's Time to Leave the 90's

How are you running your meetings?

How are your leaders running their meetings?

Unfortunately, for many, your meetings are probably run the same they were for the past couple of decades…yes decades.

Although it was available under other names earlier, Powerpoint was officially launched in 1990. I won’t go as far as to say that Powerpoint has had the same impact on the world as say Lotus 1-2-3, but it has certainly dominated the corporate meeting room!

Having grown up in the corporate world during the 1990’s I have been bombarded with “slide deck” after “slide deck”. While some have been far better than others, the vast majority of these presentations have failed to do one thing: They do not allow the audience to dive deeper.

Traditionally, a presenter builds slides with static images and text. Hopefully, these slides are authored in a way that attempts to tell a story about the content.

That’s great…BUT…what if your audience wants more detail about the content you are discussing?

Consider this scenario. At year-end, your entire leadership team travels to it’s annual business review. The most important slide shows that Customer Satisfaction is down 30% year –over-year. As expected, this creates a stir.

Now…if all the presenter can show is that the CSAT score is down 30%, this leaves a LOT of questions. Arguments will be made but answers will not be given. Questions will go unanswered and left as an “action item” for someone to later share with the team.

This is an opportunity lost!

What if the data were presented “live” or “interactively”? What if, with a single click, the presenter could drill down into Region? And then spot a single region where CSAT was down? And then drill into that and see where a particular pillar was accountable?

Then you could have a real conversation. One that not only answers questions, but one that generates new questions along the way.

The tools are available now! Advances in visualization technology have changed the landscape. They’ve actually been for a while. This type of “Minority Reports” style of  meeting is changing how we communicate in business. It’s high time that we move our meetings in this direction.

Cheers,

Kevin Taylor

Visualization @ Home

Not sure how I feel about this, but once again I am providing testimony to how much of a geek I am. Although, sometimes being a geek pays off in big ways...

Take a look at the "highlight table", or as many like to mistakenly call it, the "heatmap".

                                                                                                                                                                   

I dug this "goodie" up this morning. A few years back now, my wife and I were in the market for a new home. We had our favorites but we still had a list of 11...and unfortunately, could only afford one.

I’ve fudged the numbers in all columns for the sake of not wanting to disclose information regarding our personal finances, but the point is not lost…This nifty lil’ visual helped me land our best option, House E (all green), which happened to be my #1 choice.

This is no small feat. Let me key in something here. Without being able to SHOW my wife how the houses stacked up, here is what our analysis may have looked like:

Anyone care to wager which house we would have moved into?

3 years later…couldn’t possibly be happier with our data-driven decision. Coincidence? I like to think not.

Cheers,

Kevin Taylor

Dashboard Layout Re-Thought

Having studied data visualization and dashboard design for many years, I had been programmed to regard screen space in a very particular way.

You may have seen something similar to this picture before:

According to this, the upper left part of your screen (or dashboard) should always contain your most important data, or what you hope to emphasize.

Others describe the layout in terms of following the shape of the letter “Z”. The upper left is the most important, followed by the upper right, then the lower left and then the lower right accordingly.

With this in mind, I have always pushed my filters out to the right of my visualizations. This made sense thinking strictly about the approaches above.

Then someone challenged me on this, saying “Go out on the web and find me a site that has the filtering or navigation on the right side of the screen.”

Although there are plenty of exceptions, the majority of websites have these controls on the left side of the screen. Almost as if to say, “Here, Right Here, This is where you tell me what you want to see!!!”

Try it for yourself. Facebook.com, CNN.com, Gmail.com and even most internal corporate sites have the controls placed strategically on the left side of the screen, consuming at least a portion of the “Emphasized” quadrant.

So while approaches like the ones I had read over and over again are still very valuable in terms of where to place each visualization, User Experience should never be overlooked. For this reason, I have started designing most of my dashboards with the filters on the left.

Cheers, 

Kevin Taylor

Never Say Never! Except When...

Sorry “Beiber Nation! This is not a blog about a pop song. Your Welcome to the rest of the world.

A mentor of mine once warned me against using absolute terms like never and always.  In the world of visualization there are a lot of rules and principles, but rarely are there laws that are written in stone, never to be broken…Although some of the purists might wish to argue this point.

While there are some rules that really should be avoided in almost any situation, there are still typically exceptions. The main 2 arguments I tend to hear are :

1. The customer asked for it.
2. My boss asked for it.

Both of these are very valid arguments in the real world. For the former, I’d suggest designing as they have requested but also show them a better alternative. For the latter, good luck!

With that said, I want to raise one design rule/principle/guideline that should never, ever, ever, ever be broken…ever. Do NOT sort your data alphabetically when your intention is to show a trend over time.

The issue here may be obvious, but let’s look at how this can blind one’s analysis:

Looking at the chart below it’s quite difficult to determine what direction the data is trending…at best, it will take some time.

Not so hard in the chart below is it?

So if your boss demands the 1st chart, you might consider a different role.

I saw this recently in a dashboard and I do not believe it was by design…but it was there. So the lesson here is to check your work and when you’re done checking, check it again and they have someone else check it. Otherwise your credibility could be challenged.

In one of my 1^st blogs titled “Do You See What I See” , I suggest that as designers we should have others validate our visualizations. This situation might have been avoided had the designer heeded this advice.

I’d like to know if you all have any “Never-Break” rules? Please leave a comment.

Cheers,

Kevin Taylor

If Data is the New Bacon, How Can We Prepare?

It’s no secret that more and more and more data is becoming available. When I got started working with data in 1999, Terabyte was very rarely heard word. Today we’re speaking an entirely different language: Exabytes and Zettabytes and, before too long, Yottabytes (May the force be with you).

What there’s not necessarily a lot of…people with the skills and “know-how” manage the new landscape or to transform the data from data to information to insight.

"There is a shortage of big data experts," said Michael Rappa, director of advanced analytics and distinguished professor at North Carolina State University. "I don't see the gap narrowing. Universities aren't producing enough. We have 80 grads per year" with master's degrees in analytics. "We could be producing 800 per year and still not meet demand. With each class, the demand goes up."

The Advanced Analytics program referred to above is gaining a lot of attention from the corporate world and thus, admissions has become extremely competitive. However, there are alternatives.

One such alternative is the 1^st Associates Degree Program in Business Analytics. Offered at Wake Technical Community College, the program is now in its 2nd class which includes over 70 students, most of which already possess Bachelor and Master degrees in various fields.

In addition to the degree program, the school also offers 2 different  certifications (Business  Intelligence Certificate & Business Analyst Certificate). To meet the demands of the modern world, classes are offered both in-person as well as online.

If you or one of your colleagues is interested in the program, please don’t hesitate to ask questions and be sure to check out the program website below:

 http://www.waketech.edu/programs-courses/credit/business-analytics/program-information

Cheers, 

Kevin A. Taylor

Pies for Binary Comparisons? Not so fast Skippy

If you study data visualization enough, you’re probably aware there is a large constituent of folks that believe pie charts suck. However, most have at least some level of acceptance for their use. ***although as I found out on Twitter last week, plenty of hardliners do exist***

Some experts say a pie chart should never exceed 5 slices, some say 3 and others say no more than 2. Personally, I’d say no more than 2…with a possible exception for 3 slices if you must.

Yet even if you only have only 2 slices, pie charts can still have their shortcomings.

While speaking with an industry expert some time ago, I shared a dashboard I had built. I had mistakenly thought hat using a series of pie charts would be a good choice to show the ratio between Red Badge and Blue Badge workers across 4 different regions. Needless to say, my colleague blasted this.

Here’s the reasoning. And it’s not that the pie charts don’t show the ratio well for each region…it’s the extra bit of insight that the pie charts can’t deliver…at least not very well.

Here’s what I originally had (I have omitted all labeling and axes as they’re not pertinent to this discussion & Red = Red Badge and Blue = Blue Badge in all visualizations):

While it’s easy to see the split of Red to Blue for any given region, it’s impossible to compare the regions. OK, may you be able look back and forth to see the slice..but which has more?

We could use size to show that right?

Sort of. But it’s been proven that we suck at comparing 2-D surfaces & Angles. What we do excel at is comparing length.

Using a bar graph, it’s easy to see  not only the ratio of red to blue, but also the total number for each region and how they compare to one another. And it takes up considerably less space! Very glad that someone pointed this out to me and hope you’ll find this valuable too!

I wrote about this one as I know that stacked bars have their shortcomings as well and I'm really hoping you will be vocal about what works even better!

Cheers, 

Kevin Taylor