Capstone project brief

1. Programme introduction and information (Completed)

2. Navigating Canvas (Completed)
3. Meet the Faculty (Completed)
4. Meet the programme Learning Facilitator (Completed)
5. Meet your Career Coach (Completed)
6. Meet your fellow participants ((Not yet completed))
7. Programme outline (Completed)
8. Programme calendar (Completed)
9. Passing criteria (Completed)
10. Capstone project brief (Completed)
11. How to schedule a 1:1 session (Completed)
12. Frequently asked questions (FAQs) (Completed)

The capstone project reflects the effort you have put into this programme and showcases your
ability to develop and answer a question of interest using the techniques you have learned.
Your final capstone project will focus on both applying data analytics to a business problem
and communicating your findings to a non-technical audience with an executive report.

Deliverables
For your capstone project, you will deliver an executive report that details your findings.

Structure and schedule

Module 19–20: Project exploration
At this point in the programme, you should start considering what research question(s) and
business context you want to tackle in your capstone project. You can begin exploring the
internet for at least two data sources that you will eventually analyse.

 Data sources should be CSV files, SQL databases or other data acquired using
web scraping or via an API.
 Data sources should be made up of one or more data tables.
 Data sources should include at least 1,000 rows of data (observations) and five
columns (features).
 The source and background of each data source should be clear.

Module 21–22: Project proposal

During Modules 21 and 22, you will schedule a one-to-one session with your Learning
Facilitator. In this session, you will come prepared with:

 A one-page project proposal that includes at least two separate data sources.
  Details about the data sources’ columns, characteristics and row count as well as
whether any data cleaning is required.
 A plan for how the data sources will be merged.
 Your proposed analysis and technique (SQL, Python and/or Tableau).

At this time, your Learning Facilitator will:

 Help you refine your initial problem formulation and data needs.
 Suggest where to source the data you will need.
 Suggest techniques and tools that may be suited to your project.

Module 23: Data analysis

Once your Learning Facilitator has approved your project proposal, you can begin your
analysis. In Module 23, you will learn about communicating your results to stakeholders. You
should work on your analysis during this time, and then you can apply what you learn about
communicating results to your executive summary.
You can use one or more of the three following options for data analysis:

 SQL: load data into a local SQL database (Postgres server required).
 Python: load data with pandas and analyse in a Jupyter Notebook.
 Tableau: load data and analyse using the Tableau interface and tools.

Module 24: Executive summary

As the final component of your capstone project, you will draft an executive report that
describes your capstone project.
The executive report should be in one of the following formats:

 A slide presentation
 A PDF report
 A Github Pages website
 A Tableau Cloud dashboard (showing graphs and visualisations) and an
accompanying PDF report (containing other parts of the report)

The executive report should contain the following sections:

 Title
 Executive summary
 Introduction that provides background and context for your problem, why you
chose this research question and why it is a strong candidate for a data-driven
solution
 Methods section, including a description of your data sources (at least two); a
summary of any data cleaning you performed; description and justification of
your selected method for analysis (use any models or methods you have learned
about).
 Results section, including descriptive statistics, including graphs with axis labels
and captions; your results, including graphs with axis labels and figure captions;
and a discussion and interpretation of your results
 Conclusion that summarises the work you have done and your recommendations
for next steps