Particularly when an initiative is growing, whether in sales or projects, it is difficult to keep track of everything that is happening and this type of visualization allows us to maintain control.
There are programs and tips on how to achieve better visualization based on your current needs, but something that is less talked about, but we all come across when trying to put the above into practice, is DATA.
If you don't have data that reflects everything you want to include in your visualization, no matter how powerful your tool is, it will be of little help. That's why here are some points to keep in mind.
1. How and where is your data stored?
Does your client make a purchase and the data is recorded on mobile number philippines some portal? Do your coworkers have to record information about the projects they are working on somewhere?
It is very important to know where your data is stored and to know your ability to connect it to a visualization tool.
For example, any online spreadsheet can be accessible for a tool like Data Studio, Power BI or Tableau to read.
If these are stored in software, you should check if it can be connected to your visualization tool. If not, you can connect it by manually copying the information provided by the software and pasting it into a spreadsheet. It is more work, but it solves the connection problem. In this case, you should keep in mind that the information will not remain online, but will be updated according to the frequency with which you update it. In any case, a direct connection does not guarantee real-time data either. You should confirm with the provider how often their information is updated.
If the data is recorded manually, it is important to verify that it is actually being done, especially at the beginning. Generating the habit of recording data is one of the biggest challenges.
2. What is granularity?
The most important concept to keep in mind is the granularity of your data.
Granularity is the smallest division of your data. For example, if you record how much bread was sold during a day, then your granularity will be the day. If you record every day, then you can easily know how much bread was sold during a month.
On the other hand, if you want to know at what time the most bread is sold, you will not have a way to get that information, since for that you would have to know how much was sold each hour, and the record is only daily.
In other words, you can always get more general information than your granularity, but you won't be able to access anything more specific than that. However, it would be a lot of effort to record that data every hour. Luckily, there are several programs that track sales and provide a granularity of seconds, that is, they tell you the exact time a product was sold. You should also be clear about the concept in case you need to view less defined things, such as a project, or other data in which you define what is recorded.
3. Temporality
And I'm not talking about time granularity, but about saving historical information about your data. In cases like a sale, you'll probably never need to change the information, since the products that were purchased, or the time at which the payment was made, won't change.
But if you have social media information, you will constantly update the number of followers or subscribers. In that case, you could easily update that data every week, and you could be happy to see that the new number is much higher than what was previously recorded.