Analytics Projects: questions to dashboards and recommendations

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From a request to a project brief

In simple words

Before you build a treehouse, you ask: who is it for, what must it hold, and when must it be ready? A project brief asks the same things about an analysis, before anyone touches the data.

Before this course: Data Analysis in Practice (course 7.3.2). You should already know how to check a dataset, describe a distribution, read a confidence interval and correlation, and make honest charts. The SQL examples use the level of SQL Joins & Analysis (course 7.4.2); if you have not done it, use the spreadsheet way given in each lesson. Here we go one step deeper: running a whole project, from the first question to a recommendation someone can act on.

Key facts

Requests usually arrive vague: "Sales are down. Can you look at it?" Your first job is to find the decision behind the request: what will someone do differently depending on your answer?
A project brief is one page, agreed before you start:

Part	Question it answers	Example (our practice shop)
Stakeholder	Who asked, and who will act?	The shop owner and the website manager
Decision	What will they decide?	Where to spend next month's website budget
Question	What exactly must the analysis answer?	Why did conversion fall from September to October 2026, and where is the biggest gap?
Metrics	How will we measure it?	Conversion rate, average order value, revenue (Lesson 2)
Scope	What is in and out?	Online orders, August to October 2026; no store sales
Data	Which sources, who owns them?	Monthly traffic export, funnel export, order list
Deliverables	What will be handed over?	A dashboard, a one-page memo, the cleaned data and the queries
Deadline and check-ins	When, and when do we talk?	Draft in one week, final in two
Success	How will we know it helped?	The owner can choose an action and say why

A widely used project framework is CRISP-DM (Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining). It has six phases: Business Understanding, Data Understanding, Data Preparation, Modeling, Evaluation, Deployment. The order is not strict: projects move back and forth between phases.
This course follows the same idea in plain words: brief, metrics, clean, analyse, check, dashboard, recommend, hand over.
Write down assumptions and open questions in the brief. Ask about them early, not on the deadline day.
A good question is specific, measurable and tied to the decision. "Look at sales" is not a question; "Which device lost the most orders between September and October?" is.

Step by step

Write the request exactly as you received it at the top of a new document.
Ask (or write down) the decision: "What will you do with the answer?"
Fill in the nine rows of the brief table for your own project.
Rewrite the question until it names a metric, a time period and a group.
List your assumptions (for example, "October data is complete") and open questions.
Send the brief to the stakeholder and ask for a yes or changes before you start.
Check: someone who was not in the meeting can read the brief and know what you will deliver and when.

LESSON 01From a request to a project brief

LESSON 01 / ANIMATED LESSON / AI VOICE00:00 / 01:00

Voice

Read the video script

[Host] "'Sales are down, can you look at it?' That's a request, not a question."
[Text on screen: Decision, Question, Metrics, Scope, Deliverables, Deadline] "Ask what decision is behind it. Then write one page: the question, the metrics, what's in and out, and when."
[Screen: CRISP-DM circle with six phases] "Professionals use a cycle like this. You will go back and forth, and that's normal."
[Host] "Get a yes on the brief before you open the data."

Try it now

Pick a real or made-up request (from a club, a shop, a school or your own spending). Write a one-page brief using the nine parts. Then turn the question into one sentence that names a metric, a time period and a group.

ClaudeStuck? Copy a ready-made prompt for Claude

Copy this, open Claude, paste it, and Claude will walk you through the lesson step by step.

For a grown-up: Claude is for adults (18+). Copy this, paste it into Claude, and use the answer to explain the lesson to your child.

I'm learning "Analytics Projects: questions to dashboards and recommendations" on The Future Market. Lesson 1: "From a request to a project brief".

What the lesson teaches:
- Requests usually arrive vague: "Sales are down. Can you look at it?" Your first job is to find the decision behind the request: what will someone do differently depending on your answer?
- A project brief is one page, agreed before you start:
- Part - Question it answers - Example (our practice shop)
- Stakeholder - Who asked, and who will act? - The shop owner and the website manager
- Decision - What will they decide? - Where to spend next month's website budget
- Question - What exactly must the analysis answer? - Why did conversion fall from September to October 2026, and where is the biggest gap?
- Metrics - How will we measure it? - Conversion rate, average order value, revenue (Lesson 2)

The exercise I'm working on:
Pick a real or made-up request (from a club, a shop, a school or your own spending). Write a one-page brief using the nine parts. Then turn the question into one sentence that names a metric, a time period and a group.

I'm stuck. Please:
1. Explain the main idea in plain, simple words with one everyday example.
2. Walk me through the exercise one small step at a time. Ask me what I've done so far before giving the next step.
3. Don't just give me the final answer. Help me do it myself, and check my work when I share it.

I'm a parent helping my child (about 8 years old) with a lesson called "From a request to a project brief" from the course "Analytics Projects: questions to dashboards and recommendations".

Here's what the lesson says:
Before you build a treehouse, you ask: who is it for, what must it hold, and when must it be ready? A project brief asks the same things about an analysis, before anyone touches the data.

The activity:
Pick a real or made-up request (from a club, a shop, a school or your own spending). Write a one-page brief using the nine parts. Then turn the question into one sentence that names a metric, a time period and a group.

Please explain this so an 8-year-old understands: short sentences, a fun everyday example, and no hard words.
Then give me 3 simple questions I can ask my child to check they understood, and a way to do the activity together, one tiny step at a time.

Open Claude

Sources

IBM Documentation, CRISP-DM help overview (phases are not strict; projects move back and forth): www.ibm.com/docs/en/spss-modeler/saas?topic=dm-crisp-help-overview
Wikipedia, Cross-industry standard process for data mining (the six phases): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-industry_standard_process_for_data_mining

My notes

I learned this

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