London Business Analytics Group

This is a gentle beginner-level hands-on introduction to Power BI at a relaxed pace. We'll build some great visualisations and connect and wrangle our data into a good shape for analysis and visualisation. The format is a mixture of short presentations and demos and guided hands-on labs. There will be group of expert coaches to help you and answer any Power BI questions you may have. You will need to bring a laptop with the latest version of Power BI Desktop installed. How to apply for a ticket... The sign-up page is https://ti.to/london-business-analytics-group/power-bi-training (you can't sign up on this meetup page). This ticket does *not* guarantee you entry to the event. We will need you to respond to a direct email a week or so before the event and confirm that you are coming - so please look out for that email. Please enter your full name (required by the event location) and email address - otherwise we will have to void the ticket. We are also prioritising people who have not come to one of our Power BI Training days before. Please don't take this the wrong way, we want to be welcoming but many people apply for a free ticket and then their plans change - typically a 70% no show rate. We run this event every quarter and it always has a very long waitlist. We have 100 places and we do this so to avoid half-empty event and a long waitlist. More about the event... Attendees will be in groups of about 6 people. Groups will work on three challenges and each challenge will have a choice of two exercises. The coaches will introduce the two exercises; explain the data and suggest why this may be an interesting challenge. At the end of each exercise, one or two groups will make quick presentation of their results. Draft Agenda 09:30 Welcome 09:40 Overview of Power BI 10:10 Getting started - our first Power BI Visualisation This will be a step-by-step guided exercise to get familiar with Power BI. We look at some schools in south London . 11:00 Break 11:15 Group Exercise – Challenge 1 Groups can choose either - Baby Names: should you call you child Harry or Hunter, Olivia or Audrey? - League Table: can you build a better league table than the BBC Sports design? 12:30 Lunch 13:15 Group Exercise – Challenge 2 Groups can choose either - Titanic: was it women and children first? - Workers: analyse number of UK workers by region, country of birth over last decade 14:30 Break 14:45 Group Exercise – Challenge 3 Groups can choose either - Longevity: A prediction of lifespan for men and women in 35 countries. Eastern European men may not want to choose this! - Text Analysis: Frequency analysis of a news article - simply a matter of filter, split, pivot, anti-join and group-by. 15:45 Resources for Improving Your Power BI Skills 16:00 Close

Founded in 1829, King’s is London’s most central university, with four campuses bordering the Thames and a fifth located in Denmark Hill. It is also one of the UK’s leading research universities, and teaches over 30,000 students. King’s excels in many areas, however its approach to data management, business intelligence and analytics weren’t amongst them. The previous approach had a lot of inconsistency, paucity of available information, siloed data, little automation and limited governance. One staff member describe the landscape as ‘data rich but intelligence poor’. Then in 2016, King’s implemented Power BI, and for the past three years it has used it to transform this use of data to inform decisions across the organisation. In this session, Matt Gordon, Associate Director of Data and Analytics at King’s College London, will give us an overview of the Power BI journey and how King’s has been using it to help transform the organisational culture around data and analytics. Matt will discuss the successes and failures, along with the lessons learnt throughout the process, and showcase a range of Power BI reports that have been created. Matt will cover off how we’ve developed staff to get through the DAX wall and create good data models. Additionally, he will talk about positive staff engagement and adoption – focusing on the organisation of seven successful hackathons involving over 300 staff members. Finally, Matt will discuss how the programme that began with Power BI has developed to include setting up an analytics infrastructure in Azure, including a data lake and a data warehouse.

Please sign up also on the event location website at https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/12750-london-business-analytics-group - this is a requirement of the venue - you will not be able to attend if you don't. With 98% of the world's data created in just the past two years and an ever-expanding software and tech landscape, people are rightly excited to the point of evangelical about Big Data, BI, Machine Learning, Automation and what it can bring to their businesses. In 2019, you hear little of 'gut-feeling'-driven decision making... But the race to be data-drive has obstacles, both for businesses managing their data assets and analytics teams, and for individuals looking for their dream job. The sheer abundance of buzzwords, technologies and languages out there makes it harder for a company or data professional to set and achieve their specific goals, and mistakes aren't cheap! Between them, Slav Laskowski and Ned Stratton have over 15 years of experience in strategic, analytical and technical roles in data, working in numerous sectors. They believe that the key to success isn't in rushing to hire a football team of data scientists or buying expensive data science tools all at once. Instead, using data well within a business hinges on a framework made up of five inter-dependent steps. The framework is called UCOVI: Understand, Collect, Organise, Visualise, Interpret. Their talk will outline and expand on these steps and the skills, technology and people needed to do them well. It is a must-see for anyone who wants to: • identify missing links in their data, be it staff, process or skills. • make more use of data resources for insight • build or re-build ETL and analytics processes in their business • know the disciplines they or their staff need to up-skill in to progress • just find out more about the role of data within an organisation Speakers: Slawomir Laskowski and Ned Stratton Slav is an innovative and creative data/analytics leader with a history of commercially beneficial analytics solutions. Has a strong belief that data is at the heart of every modern business. He has experience with delivering data solutions for several firms including DHL, Sainsburys, Williams Lea, and Ernst & Young. He is currently Director of Data at GovNet Communications, where he is using his experience to unlock the true potential of their data by getting the foundations for digital transformation in place. Ned Stratton: Ned has 5 years’ experience in data quality management, analytics, and database management in finance, events and media, and politics. Currently in financial services, he works in SQL, Power BI and Python. His latest pet project is a data-driven results and goal-scoring prediction model for league football matches across Europe, which has taken over from the Tinder dating database that he gave an LBAG talk on in July 2018.

** External registration required - will open mid October ** This is a free full day training to Power BI for people who work with data, no matter what their job title is. It will focus on the recently introduced capabilities to help analysts get to insight more quickly. This will include the visuals with unobtrusive helpful machine learning such as the Key Influencers. We'll show how to apply machine learning and cognitive services (such as text analysis) as we prepare the data. There will be full details and agenda once registration opens in October.