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woot woot! Passed the Alteryx Designer Core certification earlier last month, and I thought I would share my experience: Logistics Sign-up Preparation Official sources: eLearning resources Non-official sources: Other blog posts Content of certification During the exam Relevance to role Next steps Logistics Sign-up was effortless! Your first step is to register for the  Alteryx Community  by creating a community profile. I did all the usual steps: introduced myself on the forum and browsed a few topics. When it's time to do the actual exam, you just need to navigate to the  Certification page  and launch the web-based exam. Note that it's an open book exam:  You may use Alteryx, the Community, and the web . The passing mark is 80% and you can re-take it after one elapsed week should you be unsuccessful in your attempt. Preparation You don't need any fancy external courses, or other eLearning programs, as Alteryx's own...

If all you know how to use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail! I frequently get asked, "Izam, can you use Tableau to create a chart that looks like this ..." or "Izam, can you use Tableau to calculate this ..." Lately, I've been thinking about how the tools we use shape the way that we go about solving problems. And the above adage comes to mind: if all you know how to use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail! Excel and PowerPoint are great for writing documents and reports. Reports which go about answering the: "WHAT"  are we planning to do?  "HOW MUCH"  are profits? or "WHEN"  does it need to be done by? Tableau on the other hand, shines when we use it to explore the question ... "WHY"  is this trend happening? "How much are profits?" For example, with the Superstore sample data set, an analyst might be interested in building out a table that compares the key performance indicators of...

Achieving sustainable growth is one of the foremost concerns of modern businesses One popular framework used by business people when analysing the impact on strategies aimed at improving revenue and achieving sustainable growth is the old chestnut of price and volume: Source: Beautiful.ai This works great, but one analysis I like to do is called cohort analysis. This really helps sharpen the focus and helps us zoom in on managerial actions that can move the dial. You can think of these as levers of value: Source:  Beautiful.ai Cohort analysis in Tableau With three, easily re-used formula, we can replicate a cohort analysis on new data sets with relative ease when we've deployed Tableau in our analytical toolkit: // A fixed LoD to set the Customer Acquisition Date [Customer Acquisition Date] {FIXED [Customer Name] : MIN ([Order Date]) } // A fixed LoD to set the Customer Lost Date [Customer Last Date] {FIXED [Customer Name] : MAX ([...

Pythonistas! Everywhere! eFinancialCareers have hit the nail on the head with their aptly titled: " Forget Excel: banks want Python monkeys now " which has this data point in it: "around 50% of incoming analyst classes have some knowledge of Python coding". Meanwhile, in other recent news, Accountancy Age, in their article " PwC’s rising star " acknowledge this year's Britihs Accountancy Award winner, Harry Pampiglione, as having developed a proprietary Python model for optimising pricing. This analysis earned the firm a six-figure fee, and has subsequently been productised. Harry's qualifications include Alteryx Core and Udemy's Python for Data Science and Machine Learning. So what's the moral of the story here? A knee-jerk, instant reaction might say … "Go enrol in Python for Financiers"! But that is kind of losing sight of the wood for the trees. Take a moment and step back … with this diagram: Source: Beauti...

Competing in today's VUCA world calls for new skills in strategy, finance and analytics I posit to you that: this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous market we find ourselves in calls for both, a new set of skills and a not-so-new set of skills. What do I mean by "not-so-new"? Robust strategic problem-solving skills and the ability to lead diverse teams in managing change in an unpredictable environment. Financial nous and being able to read a report and being able to articulate managerial decisions in financial terms: efficiency, effectiveness ... position (sufficiency) and performance (sometimes, the lack of it!). These core skills of strategy and finance are well understood by our business and leadership community ... But at the same time, the 21st century has seen an exponential increase in the volumes of data generated and its availability. We've seen this growth in the ability of systems to process that information, but at the same time, there ...