Provost Academy Georgia's Data Management Team
During the 2012-2013 school year, KnowledgeBase helped Provost Academy Georgia (PAGA) (an online Georgia state-chartered special school (SCSS)) organize and launch its data management team by hosting two workshops.
Workshop 1: Data Management Team Planning Session
Goal: To establish a culture of effective data use at PAGA.
Approach: Using a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis technique, we created a “pin-point”, “ten-point” set of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) PAGA data use strategies that could be implemented during the Spring 2013 semester.
We generated the strategies by considering the following …
1. Uses (What will we use data to do?)
2. Inventory (What do we need / have, and how well can it be analyzed?)
3. Sources (What can we access, and from whom can we access it?)
4. Calendar (When, how, and how often can we access new data?)
5. Skills (What do we need to learn in order to efficiently analyze and report?)
6. Drills (What should we consistently review, and how often?)
Workshop 2: Skills & Drills: Building Pivot Tables Using Microsoft Excel
A key workshop 1 strategy was to have the entire PAGA Data Management Team learn to build Micorosft Excel Pivot Tables (concise data summaries built using a "drag & drop" approach).
We delivered a customized "skills and drills" training session to 4 members of the team that used the following "disaggregated" data set ...
... to produce the following Pivot Table ...
Team members were then challenged to build their "skill" by completing a "drill" that involved using progressively larger versions of the dataset above.
Using larger data sets helps to build a user's appreciation for the accuracy, efficiency, and simplicity with which Pivot Tables are constructed - no matter how much data needs to be summarized!
To probe further, please check out the tutorial video below that summarizes Workshop 2 ...
Sincerely,
Derrick Brown – Principal Consultant
KnowledgeBase
Email: derrick.s.brown@att.net
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Copyright © 2013 Derrick Brown. All Rights Reserved.
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