Section 7.1. The Data

7.1. The Data

The data for this chapter's example, shown in Figure 7-1, come from a typical work queue.

Figure 7-1. Sample queue data

This is the Data sheet from the application. Column A contains the employee number of the agent who processed the item. The date and time the work was assigned to the agent is in column B.

The reference in column C is optional. The agent can enter a reference number if they want to be able to retrieve their work later. We are tracking how often the number is entered to see how its use relates to productivity and accuracy.

Column D has the date and time the work was completed, and column E the value of the item.

The Data sheet contains no formulas or significant formatting. In production, it could be linked to a query and could be refreshed with a single command.

There are 4,457 rows of data, one for each item worked on 2/19/2004. The data is sorted by the agent and assigned_date columns, and contains a complete picture of the day's work. It tells how much work each agent did, how long it took, when they started and stopped, and how many breaks they took. But arranged as one big list it is hard to understand. It is our job to build a tool that extracts the meaning from the data and presents it in a way that is easy to understand.

The agent names are in a separate data source and will be matched to the agent employee numbers on the Data sheet. This data is on the Workarea sheet and is described in the section "The Logic."