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Appendix IV) GCB Meeting Recaps

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Randy Yee edited this page Sep 23, 2020 · 1 revision

Sept 11, 2020: Data Viz Library

Recap

Action Items:

Sept 9, 2020: Core Competencies

Recap

  • How do you define core competencies?
    • Kimi: Analysts come in with varying skillsets combined with agency limitations (software) = people with different expertise, but what are things all should have basic understanding (MSD, pivot tables), basic foundation and using that with expertise, foundational knowledge piece
    • LaChandra: Baseline skills to complete essential ICPI work
    • Nicole: Crosstrained in different program areas, useful for all to have exposure and basic understanding of different program areas
    • Timothy: DOD has to have understanding of all program areas, agree with technical foundation comments, continue mastery of skills to improve processes
    • Shaylee: Foundational skillsets and knowledge that should be homogenized across agencies when coming into interagency space
    • Jessica: Data analysis
  • "Core competency" in management theory
  • Brainstorm: Making better ICPI analysts?
    • Issaka: short and long term process of training, making sure people have access to right training, continuous learning, recommended trainings and available resources, coaching/mentoring system or buddy system in order to knowledge share
    • Kimi: Not just basic data analyst duties, but ability to guide data interpretation with stakeholders, going that step beyond to provide more in-depth explanations, what MER indicators allow us or don't allow us to do, how to bridge gap better between data analysts and program folks, not all ICPI analysts have direct link to SMEs - how to give all ICPI analysts the opportunity to build these relationships/connection
    • Lachandra: Crosstraining using QC tools could help facilitate
  • Google Search!
    • Kimi found ducks
  • Core competency lists

Action Items:

Sept 9, 2020: PVA BI 201

Recap

  • BI Material Review
  • Power BI, Tableau, and MicroStrategy Syllabus Review
  • Google Search!
  • Preliminary Proposals for PVA BI

Action Items:

  • Catherine to do a quick run-thru of Tableau training
  • Randy to do a quick run-thru of Power BI training

Aug 28, 2020: Data Viz Library

Recap

Action Items:

  • Members to try installing the required tools for Github site and building their first site (locally)
  • Feel free to propose any ideas for hosting this library (or we can go with one of the above proposals)

Aug 26, 2020: Core Competencies

Recap

  • Review of ICPI Skills Survey results
  • Overview of Available "Core Competencies" Lists
    • Excel (Between the Spreadsheets topics)
    • R (Previous R Training topics, new revised syllabus being made by DAQ for their PVA course)
    • Tableau (Catherine Nichol's Moz Training)
    • Power BI (CDC Trainings)
    • Additional Areas: GIS, D3.JS, HTML & CSS
  • Presented Skill Trees as potential end product

Action Items:

  • Need to "flesh out" these lists
  • Continue brainstorming the skill trees and major buckets

Aug 26, 2020: PVA BI 201

Recap

  • Discussed Asia Region Request
    • Introduced new DIV members to the project
  • Discussed potential outline for PVA BI 201Course
    • General introduction to BI + Separate tracks for Tableau and Power BI + maybe a general advanced topics course (dashboard principles, dashboard UI/UX, etc)
    • Value-add of ICPI created training vs what you can find googling, PEPFAR specific trainings using MSD & BI features
    • Shared experience/existing trainings built within our own respective agencies
    • Might be a good idea to look at BI EdX course to see how they structured their trainings (do we have any gaps in our existing materials?)

Action Items:

Nov 13, 2018

Present: Katya, Imran, Shazad, Brittany, Aaron, Kashmira

Recap

  • Skills Assessment
    • Discussion about updating the original skills assessment from about a year ago, used to help develop cluster teams. We may want to update the assessment and move it to Google Forms rather than Excel and think about frequency of assessing team.
    • Kashmira also discussed the desire to capture skills gained with TDYers from the field who spent time this past year at ICPI. She is looking for input around question to pose to the field for use during the ICPI retreat.
  • R Training - Shazad updated the training repo with all the final material and organized the README. Travis will record long sessions of 3 and 4 by Nov 30.
  • Open edX
    • Software - Open edX, now dubbed PEPFAR Academy, hosts screen recording but is not a platform for actually recording them. The OGAC training team provided a few recommendations on software (Camtasia, Screencast-O-Matic, Recordit or ActivePresenter), which needs to be cross checked against what is approved by agencies. USAID and PC allow Camtasia and PC also has Snagit approved. Waiting to hear back on CDC and DOD. Even if these are approved by agencies, most require purchasing a license.
    • Training - DIV has a training session with PEPFAR Academy scheduled for Dec 11. To make the best use of our time, we are proposing recording a number of short videos on creating Pivot Tables in Excel using MSD data (with a focus on HTS). Team members should select 1-2 "sessions" and outline the contents, to be no more than 5 minutes. We can use this outline to record sessions and post a "course" on PEPFAR Academy on Dec 11.

Current Work Topics

  • Record R Training
  • Develop material for PEPFAR Academy training

May 1, 2018

Present: Shaylee, Imran, Shazad, Brittany, Aaron

Recap

  • Reviewed the status of tasks from the last two weeks, #70
    • Style Guide - Aaron posted some test visuals to test fonts out on and is looking for feedback. Wasn't able to spend too much time on other components of this over the past period.
    • Back end of Tool guidance - Katya setup a meeting for this Thursday to have a forum for "tool builders" on best practices around the back end setup. DIV/GCB will write these notes up as best practices. Aaron held a session on automation of tools last week.
    • GitHub - Aaron wrote up a GitHub best practices guide. There were concerns more around when to setup a repo, so we as a small group meet (Aaron, Abe, Josh, Kristy, and Katya) and talk about some of the issues. Aaron drafted a GitHub Repos best practices guide. There is still an outstanding ask for a training. Aaron has created some material for a training, but the focus is on how to use GitHub for data science, not program management.
    • Additional tasks
      • Tableau needs assessment - Katya and Brittany complied the Tableau needs assessment and sent it out.
      • Consistent labeling/names for GitHub issues - no progess
      • Color palette vlog - Shaylee and Shazad recorded on April 30/May 1. Rebecca will circulate for review.
  • Show and Tell Suggestions- As mentioned earlier, Aaron had the first Show and Tell session last Thursday on automating tools. Polling the room for suggestions, Imran suggested a session on implementing the style guide in R and Shazad suggested one on best practices around presentations.

Current Work Topics - #78

  • Style Guide, #2
  • Github Workshop

April 17, 2018

Present: Shaylee, Imran, Kristy, Katya, Aaron

Recap

  • Review status of tasks from last two weeks, #64
    • DIV Repo Reorganization - Aaron went through and cleaned up the Documents portions of the repo, organizing all the stray files into folders. Aaron also added relevant labels that Kristy laid out #63. Imran suggested that we have the same label colors and names across repos
    • DIV members in the room were on board with the proposed color palette presentation format which has been added to the Color Palette folder
    • Aaron added mock visuals to test out different fonts. Other DIV members should test this out and post any font/size options that they like. (#67)
    • Tableau Training - Katya and Brittany met and created the pre-training assessments. They would like DIV comments on this survey.
  • Color Palette vlog - OCM asked if we would put together a two minute video on the color schemes, providing an overview and how to install them on Excel. Shaylee offered to handle this.
  • Back end of Excel Tools - The feedback from the leads repeatedly asked for some standardization of what the backend of Excel tools should look like. We discussed that this is a difficult ask since different tools have different requirements in terms of structure, there may be something to be gained by having a discussion and having comment elements (eg labeling every table). We will schedule a meeting focused on ICPI former/current/future tools builder [Update: Katya has scheduled this for Thursday, May 3 1-2:30pm]. We also suggesting hosting a "show and tell" series around how tools work in order to gain insights from others and get feedback. [Update: Katya has scheduled the first meeting from 1-2 next week on the PPR].

Current Work Topics - #70

  • Style Guide, #2
  • Excel Backend Guidance #73
  • Github Best Practices and Training, #42

April 3, 2018

Present: Shaylee, Brittany S, Brittany B, Katya, Imran, Shazad, Kristy, Anu, Aaron

Recap

  • Review from Friday's Cluster Presentations - The presentation was well received (great work Katya & Jess). On the the follow up items was working with the DAQ around field engagement and capacity building (recording code, workflows, etc).
  • Video Access - How do we make our vlog and training material more accessible (when they actually exist in the future)? Katya inquired with OGAC around the edX platform they are building out. It sounds like this is still a ways off and quite a few unknowns, so this doesn't seem like the best platform to move forward with right now. The proposed alternative would be to host them on Youtube. We would need to look into screen capturing software. Imran was intrested in pursuing storyboarding for vido training as a best practice.
  • Viz Library - During Friday's Review, DIV pitched moving the meta data capturing of the Viz Library into OCM as Knowledge Management and integrating the portion around best way/practices to visualize PEPFAR related things (eg testing, targets, etc) under GBC.
  • Repo updating - [DAQ setup their repo])(https://github.com/ICPI/DAQ/) leading up to Friday's Review and it looks good. There are folders around sub-lanes and issue tags are well thought out. We discussed updating the repo which we threw together as the initial ICPI repo. Kristy made some suggestions and documented some of those.
  • Active engagement - We spent the remainder of the time discussing how to make sure we all stay more actively engaged with GCB activities. Aaron made a few suggestions including setting deadlines when projects originated, having more projects, where each person or small group could pursue something they were passionate about or we could have a few topics for each two week period for everyone to focus on and contribute to. People commented liking the idea of narrowing the scope with having a few critical topics to work on at a time in "sprint-like" activities. Other suggestions talked about incorporating work from other areas into DIV to increase engagement and get more done. Lastly, there was a suggestion that GCB leadership impose more deadline. We decided to try to focus on a few tasks between our bi-weekly meetings, where people would sign up to work on particular parts of a project.

Current Work Topics - #64

  • DIV Repo Update
  • Style Guide
  • R Training

Mar 20, 2018

Present: Katya, Shaylee, Brittany, Aaron

Recap

  • GitHub Best Practices - Aaron sketched out a few items (#44) that may represent best practices when using git/GitHub. The question spawned from having a number of repositories under the ICPI group and when it made sense to create one. The issue is that we use repos for Clusters (for program management purposes), rather than just projects. We decided the guidance for creating a repo should be when you are working with a larger project with substantial contributions which include code/analysis/tracking/updating frequently. Examples would be the PPR and DREAMS Dashboard. Aim to have a git/GitHub training in June.
  • Tableau training update - The training group had a meeting last Thursday, where we discussed the overview, audience, potential dates, and scope. The assumption is the participants will have a basic understanding of Tableau and must complete prework prior to the training. Limiting the size to 30 participants, with about 6 trainers. The participants should be fulltime analysts (to promote training of trainers similar to pre-PALS) who work with the Fact View datasets and have worked in Tableau or have a license. A pre-training assessment was drafted and will be sent out those who sign up (Doodle poll will go out Monday to firm up date in June). A repo is now on the ICPI GitHub to host all the planning and training material.
  • Workplan - team members should review items in the workplan to see if there is anything that should be added/removed/changed prior to the review next Friday.

Next meeting - Tuesday, Apr 2 12pm

Feb 12, 2018: Tableau Workshop Planning call

Present: Brittney, Noah, Kashmira, Katya

Recap

Objectives/skills

  • How to insert factview datasets
  • Basic manipulations of datasets (long vs. wide in Tableau)
  • Have different people walk through tools they've developed and show the steps they got there
  • Biggest barrier: how to best shape the data in the Tableau; think through analyses
  • Pros vs. cons of data shapes/arrangements for analyses in Tableau

Before training - Tableau power users meet

  • How we have set up datasets
  • Develop a few best practices

Pre-workshop

  • Tableau version/licenses
  • Skills assessment

Pre- and post-test - identify if this is relevant

Workshop target audience: ICPI analysts

Potential Limitations

  • access to Tableau - use of Tableau public vs. desktop
  • Factview dataset vs. Public dataset

Next steps --> Katya to send out Doodle poll to power users group (Kristy, Noah, Brittney, Aaron)

Dec 12, 2017

Present: Brittany, Kristy, Shaylee, Katya

Recap

  • Review current work
    • Brittany shared ICPI color scheme. Please provide feedback (on issue)
    • Comments: palettes provided contrast, good when thinking about targets vs results. PEPFAR palette similar to what's been used for VMMC tool; nice because lots of options. ICPI-palette turned out well; might add 1-2 other colors to it. Variations of ICPI. Color palettes: what do want to be able to convey? Panorama achievement-like scales? Switch around visuals in PPR palette, because looks nice in PPR but combination in graphs is not the best view.
    • Action: Kristy to send around info on updating palettes & Brittany to update next week.

  • Kristy:

    • Partner/IM names: reached out to Nate to ask if it's okay to post IM names and mech #s on Github? This is non-public info. However, the files are linked publicly on Zendesk and linked to public facing dashboard. Wait for response/confirmation from Nate this week before posting.
    • Issues w/Sharepoint: filepath too longs, not able to upload; Not being able to open immediately, but download now; unclear what filepath you're in.
    • Suggestions
      • Work with OCM to compile list of current issues --> Kristy create Github list
        • Compile issues from DIV members at Dec.19th meeting and other ICPI analyst
      • OCM can take it to sharepoint admins, and where can we get technical solutions

  • Katya: Platform guidance - does any agency currently has this in place? Kristy suggested Slack: use for chatting and communications, can link to files but don't add attachments.

  • All DIV meeting next Tuesday, Dec.19

  • Next GCB sub-group meeting Tuesday Jan.9

Nov 28, 2017

Recap

  • Review current work
    • Katya demonstrated Github (as project management tool) at broader 504 meeting last week
    • With lots of quarter updates and other things going on, things have been slower for 504 work the past few weeks
    • Brittany shared her work on developing an ICPI color scheme. Please provide feedback by next Wednesday (on issue)
  • Upcoming workshops
    • For the R training in Jan, Anu had sent out a survey which will be used to design based on broader ICPI level and needs. She'll circulate material with GCB for ideas, feedback, and divvying up some of the labor.
    • Also planned for in January is a Github workshop to promote the use for collaboration of analysis and promote transparency.
    • Final workshop for January could be on using Slack. Katya also offered to put together some material on when to use different platforms
  • Other products in the work or ideas
    • Standardized naming practices for partners/mechanisms - Aaron created a function for use with PPR and other data analyses. It's currently shared on Gist, but could be incorporated into the 504's repo. Kristy suggested having a standard of practice around this, pulling an ICPI names list quarterly with the dataset. Looking into whether it can be hosted externally with Nate (otherwise it can go on PEPFAR Sharepoint). Could create a workshop around callingdata stored on Github from R other other stats packages.
    • R to Tableau - To make it easier to get Fact View data into Tablueau, Aaron wrote an R Markdown file walking through how to reshape the dataset and create fiscal quarters.
    • Suggested that we start a listserv and circulate materials after any training. Best practice should be to have a one pager with each workshop.
    • Also suggested was a template for developing training materials that have a standard look and feel.

Next meeting - Tuesday, Dec 12pm

Nov 14, 2017

Recap

  • Review work in progress
    • Aaron - Github organization and repo created for sharing and organizing workflow
    • Shaylee - going through visuals and creating SOP
    • Imran
      • created naming convention guidelines and will post to Github for review
      • will send an update to Rebecca for side on inbrief (once guidance is reviewed by 504 GCB)
    • Anu - working on updating R primer from previous brownbag (with Imran)
    • Katya
      • updated the workplan and re-posted it
      • added reschedule of ICPI webinar series
  • Prioritize and coordinate any upcoming webinars
    • Katya to work with Rebecca on tracking cross training events
    • TB has an upcoming webinar and 504 members working on an peer-to-peer R training in Jan
  • Other business
    • With new finer disagg coming out in FY18Q2, should think about guidance around how to handle in tools and analysis; also need to consider guidance around HTS peds and malnutrtion disaggs
    • Brittany to work on color scheme guidance
    • Link Kristy's Pivot table guidance to 504 site
    • Need to coordinate meeting with DAQ in early Dec (after both update SOW) on coordination of activities
    • Aaron and Katya provided feedback to PRIME on FY18Q1 proposed data element changes and synthesized these changes
    • Katya to start on Tableau guide

Next meeting - Tuesday, Nov 28 12pm

Oct 31, 2017

Recap - Thanks for everyone input and enthusiasm for getting this off the ground. To recap, we reviewed the attached work plan for our subcommittee. In essence, we are trying to build capacity for ICPI around current tools that exist in PEPFAR, analytic software/processes, and establish standard processes. To facilitate most of this, we plan on setting up a Github organization to host ICPI repositories and create a static Github site for easier access.

We discussed some of the potential issues around a public facing site with government work and where to get started, since the workplan isn't laid out with a logical flow. Where we finished was we would each start working on pieces of the work plan and use the 30 min biweekly meeting to touch base and get feedback from others on where we're at. If needed, we can extend the meeting time.

Next meeting - Tuesday, Nov 14 12pm

Next Steps

  • Aaron - org repository to use and external pages
  • Shaylee - guidance on visualizing data
  • Imran - R, Naming conventions
  • Katya - update workplan; reach out to kristy re: pivot table guide
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