Welcome

This course is yours: you are going to carry out an analysis from start to finish, with your question and your copilot. Before starting, choose a question from your work that someone needs answered in order to decide something, and find out whether you can use the data: with permission and without identifiable people. If you cannot, you have Hornos Lumbre's and you only need a new question. In each block you will see how an analyst at a roadside assistance centre solved that same step, with her successes and her failures. Keep your logbook at hand: here you hand in what you check.

What you will find

• Block 1. Framing: from the business question to the analysis plan. Before calculating anything you decide what has to be answered: the decision behind the question, the figure and the grain that answer it, with what data and with what permission, and a dated plan before opening them. The risk: the badly translated question and searching until you find something. Deliverable: the framing sheet and the analysis plan.
• Block 2. Doing: exploring, modelling and leaving a trail. An analysis with a copilot is four chained requests, each with its check, and it carries just enough: if a table answers the question, the model is tested and left out. The risk: the figure that changes without your knowing why and the analysis that nobody can repeat. Deliverable: the notebook and the logbook.
• Block 3. Verifying: the project record. The four checks at project scale: which figures are verified and with what, the review by a colleague who tries to reach your figure, three explanations that are not yours and the limits, written before concluding. The risk you learn to see: falling in love with your result. Deliverable of the week: the record and the review.
• Block 4. Presenting and signing. The conclusion first, the evidence afterwards, the limits in view and the method in an appendix; a recommendation that can be carried out; ten minutes of defence with a figure recalculated live, and the retrospective. The risk: signing more than the analysis supports. Deliverable of the week: the decision note and the defence.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.