Getting started

How you use the toolkit is entirely up to you and will depend on what you need from the book. It has been designed so that you can use it as a manual to walk through each step for implementation, as an introduction and teaching resource for initial learning, and as a guide to refer to once data-driven decision practices are in place. As your skills and situations change, so can the way you use this book.

Although this toolkit can be used for one-off projects when you are in the early stages of learning and building data practices in your workplace, the emphasis and purpose of this book is to be able to develop continued data processes. Keep that in mind as you push through the next six chapters!

Book layout

What makes this book a bit different from other ‘how to’ style texts is that we will explore the toolkit and data-driven decision making in practice. The book is split into two main parts. In the first we start with the toolkit and walk you through all the big things you need to know to use data and commit to data-driven decision making. The second section takes you a step further, focusing instead on specific and more specialised topics for you to widen your understanding and approaches to making data-driven decisions, written by people who have lived and breathed data in practice. This second section will allow you to get real-life ideas for how you could use data-driven decisions, and will allow you to dive into areas of data and using data as and when you are feeling confident enough.

The idea of this book and the two parts is that the toolkit will first teach you, then support you as you live it, and the final section will give you the expertise and inspiration to develop your foundation of knowledge.

A core feature of the book is that you can jump between the toolkit and the chapters in Part 3. You can choose to head to the chapters in Part 3 as you work on one area from the toolkit, or you can focus on the toolkit and read the other chapters at a later date as a focused look at data collection and analysis approaches.