What questions do you ask when starting a data analysis project?

[Bud]

A general question about managing data analysis projects.

What questions do you ask the requester?

1. Who is making this request (what level of management)? Who is the intended audience? Who will be on the project team?
2. What do you want? Can you mock up a rough example in Excel or Illustrator, etc.? What filetype/platform?
3. When do you need it by?
4. Where is the data? Where will the final product live and for how long? Who needs access to the final product?
5. Why are we doing this? Why now? What happens if you don’t get it in time?
6. How are we going to do the work? What's the plan?
7. Cleaning - How much data cleaning is required? How long will it take? Will we clean the source data or a copy of the data? How accurate do you need the analysis result/data to be? For example, if we were to guess that the data is 95% accurate, is that sufficient?

Those questions are just a stab in the dark.

What questions do you ask when taking on a data analysis project? I ask because I'm moving to a new team and am looking to develop some techniques for success to avoid the usual pitfalls of data analysis projects.

[BillFox]

give them what they need, this may not what they are asking for

show us what you are asking for

who is going to maintain it, how often?

is it private, internal, public?

do you have Department Head approval before doing the work?

[AlfredBaldenweck]

What other data is needed to get the final product?

Not analysis related, but this bit me pretty bad the other week: What size do you need the final layout to be?

[BarryNorthey]

You might consider it from a metadata standpoint as in have the requester supply a (preliminary) Summary, Description, (credits), Use Limitations, etc., for whatever product they are requesting.