Percentile Analysis – Qlik Sense

Last week I was tasked with developing a dashboard to show how well an employee was performing over time relative to their peers across many metrics. Bringing all of these concepts into a single chart took several iterations but I believe the result could be applicable to many people. In the sample screenshot, we can evaluate Employee D’s performance each quarter relative to several peer benchmarks.In Q2 and Q3, D performed below the worst peer group, but in Q4 they improved. This is based on random data, but this type of analysis is highly valuable for managers to understand and coach employees appropriately.

After many months of building in Qlik, I was able to incorporate several of the complexities available in Qlik to create this chart. It uses the Aggr function to separate the data into appropriate sub-sets to be processed. Set analysis allows for evaluation of the entire set of employees for the percentile (fractile) calculation.

Development hit one road block where I was attempting to incorporate the time dimension. This was solved by including the exact type of time (month, quarter, or year) into the Aggr function.

Here is the recipe:

Variable to create many percentiles:

eFractile = Fractile({<Employee={*}>} Aggr(Sum({<Employee={*}>} Sales), Employee, Quarter),$1)

Chart – Combo Chart

Dimension: Quarter

Measure 1 [Bar Type]: Sum(Sales)

Measure 2-n [Line Type]: $(eFractile(0.25))

https://charts.qlikcloud.com/5839fa596000fbff00d4d1ce/chart.html

Building Data Products

Three Simple Rules for laptop-analyticsBuilding Data Products that People Will Actually Use – Tim Trefren (highscalability.com)

Expanding beyond Tim’s great article, with a little of my own life experience: one of the main functions of my job is to communicate stories through data. Learning this new form of communication has been a challenge as I am naturally inclined to want to delve into the complicated data. Having to work with many professionals who would rather eat dirt than do math has shown me that you have to build the story using simple graphics and meaningful numbers. The key here is to keep things simple which much harder than it looks. As Mark Twain says “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” To have truly revolutionary products, the data has to be presented simply.

Many companies now have begun to offer data analysis as their flagship product or main feature. Applications such as Salesforce and Tableau aggregate data and produce output that is both sophisticated in structure and simple to understand. These are used by people who couldn’t tell you what a query or a database was. Keep it simple, make it pretty.