Visualizing the Washington University Libraries’ Strategic Planning Progress
Overview
The Washington University Libraries’ strategic plan effort is a five-year process, which includes six strategic directions, 18 goals, and 32 objectives. Data Services worked in collaboration with the strategic planning team to conceptualize requirements, build a workflow, and produce a visualization.
Data
Reports by objective groups with various start dates, measures and tasks, and multiple reporting events over a long period of time.
Workflow
Once the problem was conceptualized, our first step was to develop a form with the end visualization in mind, using solid naming conventions, quantitative and qualitative fields. We built the form in Qualtrics and set it up so that the team lead could come back to their previous response and update it with new developments. While we were able to control some aspects of the data structure in building the form, some data scrubbing was still necessary in order to make it ready for visualization in Tableau. For this we wrote a script in R (which can be reused) to eliminate errors and discrepancies within the responses and reformat the output data. The clean data could be brought into Tableau, where we determined which attributes we wanted to visualize at a given point in time. Using Tableau we were able to elegantly demonstrate levels of completion for both the objectives and associated tasks, and what is still ahead.
Tools Used
- Qualtrics: An online survey tool that supports the research needs of academics who need to create and manage sophisticated questionnaires. Washington University has institutional access to this tool.
- R: A programming language for data management, analysis, and visualization. You can download it here.
- Tableau: A fast, intuitive tool for data analysis and visualization. While our visualization was created using Tableau Desktop, Tableau Public is free.
If you’d like to know more about this project or any of these tools, feel free to contact Data Services.