Planning
Every team is different and used different tools, but that’s not a problem, because I just love learning new management tools. If it were actual tools like hammers and screwdrivers, I definitely wouldn’t be as adept - just ask me about the half built set of shelves in my garage. Not good. Thankfully, in this case, we decided to use a tool called JIRA.
Cluster Topics
Because this is my first project in financial services, the next step was to identify the requirements and expectations of the product owner. The good news was that the product owner had no interest in my lack of carpentry skills (and subsequently didn’t want me to store anything in my non-existent garage shelving either).
Many people use Excel to create sophisticated calculations, but from a business perspective, Excel sheets won’t get the job done by itself. Having a dashboard is essential to collect, track, analyze and predict data. It’s like a nice sports car - it may look OK without the dashboard - but it really needs one for you to get the most out of it.
My client wanted to convert data into resourceful information that helps managers predict losses on existing loans. Losses = not good, so the project I was working on had to be good. For this project, I have an Excel sheet to understand how portfolio managers analyze their investments using false accounts.
Primary Research
At this point, I needed to learn more about what precisely a Foreign Exchange is, and after research, I found that Foreign Exchange is the precise conversion of one country's currency into another. For example, one can swap the U.S. dollar for the euro. Foreign exchange transactions can take place on the foreign exchange market, also known as the Forex Market.
The forex market is the largest, most liquid market in the world, with trillions of dollars changing hands every day. There is no centralized location, rather the forex market is an electronic network of banks, brokers, institutions, and individual traders (mostly trading through brokers or banks).
Once I knew more about FX, my first thought was “Wow, a million yen sounds like it would be a lot of money...but it’s really not. Hey, at least I’m a yen millionaire!” My next step was to analyze the spreadsheet that was provided by the client to understand essential aspects when monitoring foreign loans. To do this, I played with data visualization in Excel to have a picture of how information can be displayed based on hierarchy. This was much more fun than actually trying to play with the data. It couldn’t catch a ball very well.
Secondary Research
After this, I analyzed competitors to see what data visualization they used to display information. To my surprise, I noticed that the donut chart was popular. I do like tasty donuts. But unfortunately, a donut chart is a wrong graph, especially when dealing with sophisticated loans, as users focus on proportional areas of the slices to one another and the chart as a whole. Now that’s taking a bite out of a donut, for real.
