Your final project for STA303/1002 is a consulting project for MINGAR. You will be analyzing data about their customers and creating a report appropriate for the Board of Directors.
Note: MINGAR isn’t a real company, it would be massively reckless to provide 600 people with customer data with this level of detail. It would be very easy to identify individuals from data like this. That said, this dataset is based on real research and trends, and my own experiences running a small consulting company.
Submission information
| In formation | Note |
|---|---|
| Name | Final project |
| Type (Main, Mini or Basket) | Main |
| Value | 45% |
| Due | Thursday, April 7, 2022 at 3:03 p.m. ET for 2% pt bonus. Submissions accepted until Monday, April 11, 2022 at 3:03 p.m. |
| Submission instruction | Submission: Via Markus |
| Accommodations and extension policy | There are no routine extensions granted for the final project. In exceptional circumstances, you can work with your College Registrar and me on this. |
What’s the deliverable?
Your final submission will be a report that includes:
- a cover page
- an executive summary
- a technical report
- consultant bio(s) and company ethics statement
- code appendix that specifically documents how the web scraping, API
and census work was done,
with a focus on the ethical/professional considerations related to acquiring this data
You will need to further develop and answer the research questions relevant to the client, communicate in ways appropriate to the audience for each section of the report, choose appropriate methods and create professional visualizations and tables to explain your results.
Your report must be written in a reproducible Rmd, that Knits to PDF, and you will submit the PDF, Rmd and any images/extra data to MarkUs for the reproducibility component of your mark.
I will be providing a template for you to use.
Timeline
All times are 3:03 p.m. ET.
March 18: Register your group/individual status by submit your company name, group members (may just be you)and NDA to the form.
April 4: Beginning of ‘project focus’ week. No other required tasks or new content.
April 7: deadline to submit for 2 percentage point BONUS
April 11: final deadline to submit.
Penalties to AVOID
5 percentage point penalty for failing to correctly register as an individual/group by the deadline.
- This includes providing CORRECT details for all group members that will allow me to link you on MarkUs. (Your ‘Contractor ID’ is your UTORid!! Please don’t get this wrong.)
- There should be 1 PDF PER PERSON, so a team of 3 should submit 3 NDA files AS PDFs to the form (i.e., don’t merge).
- 5 percentage point penalty for not submitting the Rmd that creates your PDF (this also applies if your PDF submission is made in Word etc.)
Steps
Step 1: Read the first client email and decide if you’re working as a group or individual
- You can check the emails from your client here.
- You can work on your project alone or with up to three other
students (regardless of section) for a group of four total
students.
- The section you are enrolled in does not matter, you may work with students across sections/within the same section, etc.
- You can find teammates with Piazza.
- My hope is that your final deliverable will be something you could include in your portfolio, so perhaps make sure all teammates are okay with publishing this publicly at the end.
Step 2: Create a consulting company
- There are no criteria other than the name should be professional (i.e., no rude words, resist overly obvious puns) and needs to be typable in ‘Latin script’, i.e., the letters A to Z (with hyphens/accents if needed, just be careful the symbols can be Knit to pdf.)
Step 3: Sign your NDAs
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are a common legal agreement that consultants often enter into. It will outline who owns what, what can and cannot be shared publicly and a range of other legal points.
For the purposes of this class, you don’t have to worry about the ‘legal-ese’ and what you’re actually agreeing to, because you are NOT actually agreeing to anything. BUT I do think you should see how much you can understand as it is realistic that you might have to comprehend and sign a document like this in future, as a professional.
If you’re working in a team, each member of the team must sign their own version and then ONE member will submit ALL the individual PDFS on behalf of the team.
Note, if you have trouble contacting a member and getting their form, this may be a sign they won’t be easy to work with on the project. Likewise, please don’t be that team member that everyone complains about for not doing any work.
If there are team dynamic issues, LET ME KNOW ASAP, I can help you work on a solution, or split up the team (that won’t be penalized).
Step 4: Submit your NDAs (and through this, register as group or individual)
By Friday, March 18 at 3:03 p.m. ET, you must submit your group/individual information through this form, including everyone’s NDAs. Only ONE member should submit on behalf of the group. If you’re working individually, you just submit for yourself.
If you do not submit this information by the required date and time, there will be a 5 percentage point penalty applied to your final project grade.
Step 5: Work on your project
Access the data and template on the Data and hints page
Use the Hints to:
- webscrape the device data,
- access the the postal code conversion file, and
- access the Canadian census data.
Make use of project office hours (see schedule on the office hours page on Quercus)
Week 12 is a ‘project focus week’, meaning no new content will be released on the project is your main focus for this class.
Suggested task list as posted Mar 25
Edited lightly, see the original here.
(If you’re not quite on this schedule is all lost? No way! This list was in response to student questions at the time about how I might suggest they plan their work.)
Between now and early next week:
Familiarizing yourself with the project information
Acquiring the additional data you have been instructed to.
Cleaning and merging data.
Refining research questions.
Could start preparing the appendix about acquiring the external data.
Bulk of next week:
Finishing up data prep as informed by working on data summaries, visualizations, models and model assumption checking (and doing these things).
Keeping notes on decisions and limitations.
Beginning to write up your methods sections and prepare tables/visualizations.
Last week of term:
Finishing any final parts of your analyses.
Writing up methods, results, discussion (+ strengths and limitations), introduction and executive summary (likely in that order).
Making sure references are set up well and are complete and that any text/ideas from other sources is quoted or paraphrased appropriately and cited.
Submitting your final project on MarkUs by 3:03 p.m. ET on April 7 for a +2% pt bonus on your final project mark OR submit by April 11 (3:03 p.m., of course).
Step 6: Submit
Submit all relevant files to reproduce your report. Note that is includes and image files that are not directly created by R. The data provided will already be present, but any new datasets you create will need to be uploaded.
Exception: Do NOT upload the post code conversion file or large version of the census API data. You should create appropriately sized datasets for this project from them and save and upload these.
- You will document and explain the process by which you got and wangled these datasets, so that someone else could follow your process themselves, BUT you will ensure the licensed data is not actually provided.
Why? This means that you can share (most of) this data and project in your own online portfolios, etc., but be very clear about what is and isn’t appropriate to share publicly.
Notes about bonus and submission dropboxes
Due to the two deadlines, there will be two dropboxes on MarkUs for
this assessment. To avoid confusion, the dropbox for the 2% bonus early
submission will be open until the deadline on April 7. After that, the
dropbox for the normal submission will be open from April 7 to 11 only
for groups that
Warning about the early dropbox
Only submit your FINISHED project to the early dropbbox. If you’re not sure if you’ll get it done by the deadline for the bonus, this is the one time I’ll tell you NOT to do a safety submit. To ensure clarity for the grading team, anything submitted to the early dropbox WILL be considered your final submission.
Not sure about what this means? PLEASE ASK.
Credits
Thank you to Sonia Markes for contributing to the background research and planning for this project.