Author: Cedric

Owner of Colourless Green, a data visualisation and analytics company specialising in small business and energy efficiency.
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Know your limits; exceed limits: TC16 redux

Limits. Austin City Limits is the music festival here. There are limits on the mathematic functions we write at times. There are capacity limits to venues, transmission lines, to batteries and capacitors. There are limits to how much one person can eat and drink in a 12 hour period, to how functional one can be off of 6 hours of incredibly interrupted sleep.
Limits are like rules.
They’re made to be broken.

Tableau Conference 2016 (#data16) was about breaking limits. Tableau is a data visualisation (viz) software whose purpose is to show us the data in a way that we can understand quickly, easily, and intuitively. And for those of us who do that, we ride the beginner and intermediate path.

What I learned at this conference is that, in practice, the colour-in-the-lines approach is probably all my clients are going to want and need. But I have a mastery of that beyond what I thought. As I suffered through intermediate classes, I realised that I had more in me.

Much of the conference isn’t really about the limited view of Tableau. The advanced sessions teach you the nuance of the Tableau engine and how it works. But the Jedi sessions: Those are where the limits are shattered.

From building out vizzes that act as video games to hacking data sources by making copies of PostGresQL databases, I saw a dazzling array of limitless vizzing.

I was inspired by what is possible if you just take off the reins.

And of course, any comic book will tell you that there is a direct correlative factor between responsibility and power (that would be a nice scatterplot…). But #data16 is about unleashing that power and giving in to the calling within.

This week didn’t go as I had expected. I slept a lot less than I thought I would. I ate a lot. But #data16 taught me more of those core concepts and cemented in me why one would use a table calculation versus a filter. It also taught me that the reason I love vizzing is because it takes a mindset that looks at problem solving in a different way. The Tableau community, all these people from all over the world applying vizzing to pharmaceuticals or banking,  is a resource to be tapped, a wealth of inspiration, and a damned fine group of people.

The chaos of having 13,000 people was palpable. I was shut out of two of the four keynotes due to capacity limits (and one advanced dashboarding session). But despite those limitations of physical space, the limitations we have while vizzing are not as clear cut. It takes time, brainpower, and importantly data.

Nevertheless, I hope to ride this high for a while and take more passes at #MakeoverMondays or peruse Tableau Public. Because although my clients won’t necessarily want the shiniest, most brilliant viz, the elements that are brought together to create one are definitely skills that people want to have on their team.

I’ll probably have more to say as I continue to (literally and figuratively) digest this week. But until then, happy inspirations.

See my TC15 recap here.

 

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What I’ve learnt the last year at Nike, Part 2

When my last cheque came last January, and all my leads were silent or in a holding pattern, I took a bet on some contract work for a little company about an hour away. Over the last 8 months, I’ve learnt a lot, both about myself, the direction I want this company to go, and on the applicability and value of what it is that I do.
Continued from part 1

Part 2: New tools

Alteryx

When I started at Nike, I had a passing interest in Alteryx, a product that I saw as something that would be useful for a big company, but may not have much other value. And with the annual price tag at the level it was, there was no way I could justify learning the product and then trying to find clients that would want those services.
Within 3 months, I was an avid convert and see its value in a multitude of situations. The best thing about contracting with a company, for me, are these practical learning opportunities. I learn things really quickly–and I have great teachers at Nike–but besides that, Alteryx is such an incredibly flexible tool that it can be applied to problems big and small.

Data blending

Its primary strength is its ability to encode commonly-used queries into tools that can simply be copied and pasted. Additionally, as a blending tool, it does the job so incredibly quickly, that it probably pays for itself in a couple of weeks. Simply put, an amateur SQL user like me may spend days perfecting a text-based query in a frustrating circle of guess-check-research-reimplement-fix until the query is perfect. Or, I can do the same thing in Alteryx and the development cycle goes to minutes.
As a data-blending tool, I know no other parallel. And becoming a part of the community of Alteryx users here in Portland, like with the Tableau User Groups, will continue to deepen my experience, breadth and knowledge.

Alteryx Server: Automation

When I started at Nike, I inherited a process that took me roughly a full workday to complete. There wasn’t a lot to running the processes (I literally hit ‘run’ on a ‘runner’ that Nike developed to run several processes in series), but the processes took about 5 hours to run, and then I had other tasks to take care of to finalise the batch.
Using Alteryx server, we automated the pushing of this button to Monday morning. This meant that by the time I was done with my Monday morning standup meetings, I had the full data set, run weekly, available to me before lunch. I’ve since moved this process to Sunday to take advantage of off-peak server traffic so as to be less of a nuisance to those other users who may still be running processes manually on Monday morning, bless their hearts.

Tableau

I was primarily hired for my Tableau prowess. And my dashboarding and storytelling have only improved at Nike.

Dashboarding as a substitute for SQL snippets

On a semi-weekly basis, we get reports from our IT department that tell us very rudimentary metrics about our business. On a product/week-of-projection grain, I get a summarised count of products that trip business logic errors. But when I get a count, say of 52, I don’t know if that is one product with a full year of problems or 52 products with one week of problems.
So, naturally, I built out a dashboard.
Using data from other parts of the business I was now familiar with, I grabbed relevant metrics and blended the data in Alteryx. Now, I had everything I needed to show a quantity versus time viz for each and every relevant product that tripped these errors in the report. Visual, intuitive, and for additional flair, I included the original query in the top-left portion of my dash to use as a filter.
This saves me, and the business, hours of time (that we simply didn’t spend) trying to interpret and understand the relevance of these reports. From a continuity of operations standpoint, this is a superior product to the semi-weekly email (which was something that our team inherited over time). If I inherited a dashboard that was thought out and relevant, I would think really highly of my predecessor. And that’s my metric as a contractor: am I leaving the place better, cleaner, and smarter than when I started.
I can confidently say yes.

Kanban/Trello

I was introduced to Kanban boards in grad school. When you study business in Asia, you can’t avoid the ingenuity of Japanese process design. But a couple of months ago, our team started using Trello for project management, and it has worked out so well.
Personally, I have got a lot out of it because I’m able to scribe my internal narrative on a card, keep track of my to-dos, cross off items on a checklist, and quickly and fluidly change the dynamics of my tasks.
I work with my manager to reprioritise tasks often, and we meet weekly to all talk about our tasks and how we can help one another with them.
This is a (free!) tool I will definitely be taking with me.

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What I’ve learnt the last year at Nike: Part 1

When my last cheque came last January, and all my leads were silent or in a holding pattern, I took a bet on some contract work for a little company about an hour away. Over the last 8 months, I’ve learnt a lot, both about myself, the direction I want this company to go, and on the applicability and value of what it is that I do.

Part 1: New discipline, new landscape, new players

I was hired as a part of a team that does a specific task with respect to staging products and materials at different nodes in a supply chain. I learnt very quickly that the world I had come from had a lead time of c (yes, the same c as in E=Mc2: light speed).
The world of trucks, trains, ships, and more trucks was a world completely foreign to me. Goods issued, goods receipt, material lead times… all these were considerations I didn’t have any need for in energy efficiency.
And the acronyms! Holy what. My first day, I was bewildered by the ability of people to say a sentence peppered with so many acronyms (many of them sounding the same!) that the sentence barely sounded like English.
But within 2 months, I caught on. And began to flourish. Pretty soon, I was able to conceptualise things that a few weeks earlier, I didn’t even know that I didn’t know about. This really built my confidence in learning new things. I always knew I was good at it, but I didn’t realise to what degree.
Also, within this new discipline, I was navigating a totally new culture and territory. For those who already know me, they will understand that I’m not a sporty, Nike-like guy. I’m not really into sports, I don’t wear sneakers, and I’m much more comfortable at a tailor shop than at a Big 5. But what I learnt really quickly is that Nike isn’t necessarily that one dimensional. My dapper, tie-wearing self was no threat to anyone, and I was accepted simply based on my merits. Other than that, I joined a really smart, nerdy, math-based group, so found that I fit in pretty well. The overarching culture of Nike is really more about commitments to excellence than it is to product or marketing. And I really fit in to a culture that is more concerned about excelling than what you’re wearing. I really appreciated the commitment to continuous improvement as well: my ideas about making the systems better, more fluid, and more automated (covered here) were constantly shot down at other jobs. Here, they were not only welcomed, but we implemented them in sometimes as short of time frame as 2 weeks.

New colleagues

Interworks. Slalom. And the variety of people I met at Nike means I have a new pool of people and industries to draw from for both inspiration as well as employment, either via partnership or subcontracting.
I’ve learnt that I can hit the ground running with short-term contracts and really provide immediate value to clients. This is something I wasn’t sure of coming from the utility industry because they really haven’t embraced Big Data and agile frameworks for doing business in the same way. I’m still passionate about the field of energy efficiency and the big-picture implications of that industry (and the massive change we’ll see in the next 10 years). But I’m almost always 20 years ahead of my time, and I no longer feel I have to wait for them to catch up!
I now see a bigger constellation of clients, industries, and disciplines that I could help and meet and consult for. And again, my main metric is: am I leaving this place better than when I got here? I always want to answer yes to that question.

Part 2

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Tableau Conference 2015 recap

TC15
So, I just finished the TC15 conference, and I’m on high. My brain is engaged; I’m inspired. Sleep has been difficult all week. And on Wednesday, after two nights out in a row, I thought I would sleep and sleep well.

My brain had different intentions. Inspiration flying around, I had to get up and re-engineer some data into a Tableau-ready format, which I will unveil in due time. I’m just getting started.

After the conference, on Thursday, I again stayed up late, continuing my new inspiration (as well as catching up with the rest of the world).

And this morning, between all that I learnt and all that my wife learnt in with books and Netflix while I was out, we had inspired conversations about externalities, public versus private prisons, and the nature of capitalism.

Set against the backdrop of the Las Vegas Strip, the bastion of capitalism at its supposed finest (this is what we’re all aspiring toward, right American Dream?), I realised something in our conversation.  It’s this:

Capitalism does its magic at the individual level. Everything out there [pointing to the Strip] is the product of the individual supposedly acting in their individual best interests.

But isn’t there something more, something better?

Using tools like Tableau, and actual data, viz analysts can tell you if one department is trying to save itself 10% in profit at the expense of four other departments. All that would take is the numbers.

And again, with a tool like this, we could show in the aggregate that a low-volume, $1M division saving 10% ($100,000) costing other medium- to high-volume divisions even 2% could, and would likely be a net loss.

To that $1M division/individual/any-entity-in-question-versus-an-ecosystem-of-entities, the supposed ‘bottom line’ looks great. But the externalities of service, mission, goals, or just simply other entities’ profits may net us less.

Conceptually, this fits well in the sustainability framework. It also fits really, really well in popular religious contexts:

Christianity is concerned about being brotherly, about giving, about not necessarily concerning one’s self with the individual benefit. I think this is why.

Buddhism (especially Zen) talks about the paradox of meditation in this way:

If you don’t have 20 minutes a day to meditate, meditate an hour a day.

For us, in our busy Western lives, these make no sense. They go afoul of our modern day sensibilities. But all our keynote speakers at the conference didn’t talk about profitability or about how we can squeeze the last profit out of a division. They talked about solving problems, usually social or environmental. They talked about changing our mindset. They talked about Braining on High, which is exactly what I’ve been doing all week.
Daniel Pink discussed the possibilities and benefits of taking the hierarchy and drudgery out of management. About motivating people through autonomy. About taking time for yourself at the end of the day to recognise your accomplishments so you feel good about your day.

Hannah Fry used IMG_20151022_084618mathematical models in one area of social science (where do murders happen in relationship to the murderer) to solve mosquito-vector problems (where’s the stagnant pool of water likely to be?).

 

Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about cherry-picking facts to fit within your narrative. He did it by pointing out science flaws in modern movies. Loosely quoted:

#data15“If you’re watching a period piece from the 1890s and someone walks out of a car in a tye-dyed outfit, you’d fire the costume designer. Why is that more important than getting the science right?…Sandra Bullock could have saved Clooney’s character [in Gravity] simply by giving the cord he was on a slight tug. WTF?”

He also expertly addressed the individuality problem I discovered above: he was very cognizant of the impact of policy on people, on education, and on how our society operates. The tyranny of the individual in our representative democracy (especially with cherry-pickers of data) was something he was very vocal about. And why shouldn’t he be? We have the data, the tools, and the ability to really look at the world in a data-driven way. And with a little policy, we can direct the randomness of that individual decision-making into beautiful, resilient social/economic structures that benefit people instead of tear them down.

Ken Robinson continued the dialogue about institutions and working together. He reinforced Pink’s thread about motivation. He also talked about how the externalities I mentioned above #data15have little bearing on the Earth. They have bearing on our abilities to inhabit it. He also said a lot of quippy, funny things in a very British way, which tickled me.

Tableau and data give us the tools to literally connect the dots. This cross-disciplinary thinking, which I’ve been a fan of since high school—where it was introduced to me, and reinforced throughout my education— combined with the tools to meld multiple datasets together; to apply murder vector modelling to mosquitos; to recognise that division A’s savings of $100,000 is costing the whole organisation $2M—these get us out of the miserly, individualistic mindset that capitalism adores. It allows us to meld the concepts of sustainability, of social justice, and of purpose into our daily lives and daily work.

Attaching work to purpose, according to Pink, is motivational to our work. It makes us engaged. It makes us do better. The tools under my fingertips allow me to live my dream of working toward a common goal of good. Robinson said we’re in the midst of a revolution. And 10,000 supposed data geeks— from all over the world, from all walks of life, and of both genders— agreed. We’re on the front edge of it. But things are going to change.

I’m not working for Division A to save $100,000. And whenever I’m in that situation, I’m demotivated. I’m a big-picture thinker who can do microcosmic things down to the datum. All the work I do is connected to the whole. And that’s not to just Division B, C, and D’s profits, that’s to the ecosystem entirely. Without ecology, you have no society. And without society, you have no economy. That hierarchy is the only one that needs to be respected.

I’m working toward building more Portland-type places: clean water; a vibrant community; quality over cost-futzing; efficient use of resources.

All in all, it’s pretty much love.

Thanks TC15 for connecting me to that. And thank you to my wife for coming to this conference with me to ignite my brain even further.

Here’s an example of my inspiration. In a few minutes, I put this fictional case together.

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Earth Advantage Small Commercial is here

New Small Commercial

Colourless Green has been involved in some exciting developments during the late summer and fall of 2015. As of 1 September, Cedric received a certification by Earth Advantage as a commercial project steward. The Earth Advantage certification is appropriate for smaller commercial buildings (under 75,000 square feet and/or based on the complexity of the building) and is a prescriptive package.

What sets us apart from other project stewards is we’re not only looking at the building process, but the building as an asset. Given our core competencies in building monitoring, energy modeling, analytics, and reporting, what we would like to do is offer Earth Advantage Silver, Gold, or Platinum certification oversight as well as ongoing building commissioning, reporting, and analysis services. Outfitting your new building with building monitoring sensors will ensure that you get the value out of the building that you paid for. The last thing you want to do is be blamed for greenwashing. We give you the analytics, reports, and metrics to prove the performance of your green building.

It will also set the building apart from its peers in health, safety, comfort, and tenant retention. By continuously monitoring the building we can tell you if equipment is running as planned, what is behind tenant complaints about comfort, or any number of issues. Importantly, we also offer energy disclosure services with this package for those with jurisdictions requiring reporting.

Until the end of 2015, we are offering introductory rates to project teams to serve as a project steward. Contact us here to get the ball rolling.

We can talk about what building monitoring packages would be right for your building and for future tenants or owners as well.

Related: Energy Disclosure services

 

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Energy Disclosure Services

Energy Disclosure Regulations

In September, October, and November, Colourless Green is working with the City of Portland to understand the practical implication of the City’s new energy disclosure ruling. For small commercial buildings, one option is to outfit your buildings with environmental and energy sensors to automate the reporting process.  These would give you access to:

  • Diagnostics
  • Building health and energy reports
  • Automation of reporting
  • Benchmarking with other buildings
  • Tenant safety/turnover metrics such as
    • VOC reports
    • Humidity
    • Temperature/comfort

The small commercial market has historically been under the radar when it comes to these sorts of regulations. Let us help you through the transition.

Energy and reporting services

For existing buildings, we are equipped to assist you with the energy disclosure law. We care about energy, and we understand that it isn’t necessarily a building owner’s core competency. We can help ease the transition with administration, reporting, and understanding the ruling–we’re going to do it either way, so you can save yourself the trouble and have us represent your data to the City, the utilities, or whomever else you allow access. We’ll handle the headache and be the point of contact so you don’t have to deal with it.

We can also, on a schedule you determine, give you the essential details relevant to your operating budgets, as well as benchmarking versus other buildings in cities with disclosure laws so you understand what your competition is doing.

We also offer small commercial green building services. Learn about our Earth Advantage small commercial new building services here.

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Climate change can be awkward

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I read an article today about a strange animal that was found on the beach of Siberia. It was a large, mamallian sea creature with a long beak. It made me think about a few things, mostly the connection of what it is we do here at Colourless Green and how it connects to the big picture.

Energy efficiency has grown a lot in the last 10 years. And as I celebrate being in the industry for that long, I can see that energy efficiency is one part of a holistic scheme to keep climate change at bay. Here in Portland, we’ve been seeing record-breaking heat as early as June (which is normally a rainy time of year for us). But we don’t want to confuse weather with climate.  Yet, over these last ten years I have noticed changes. The summers are hotter, the snowfall less in the winter. The rain has changed here, as well–no longer sprinkling and persistent.

We work in energy efficiency because it is connects us to sustainability. Of not using industry to destroy the planet we live on; of making sure that social justice exists. We do energy efficiency and apply our skills to EE and small businesses so that strange animals like this don’t wash up on the beach after thawing from an iceberg.

My grandfather always told me: “Never get up in the morning to do a job you hate.” I think I’m serving him well. I love what I do, every day. And I hope what I do keeps things like this from happening in the future.