Practice Building Models for Personal Projects

Today’s post is the final contribution – for now – from UK-based consultant Grant Perkins who kindly offered his assistance while I was ill.

I can’t speak for everyone of course but personally I find that something that interests me is much more rewarding to work with and through than something that does not interest me.

Now we can’t always pick and choose what we have to work on but if we wish to practice to discover new skills or enhance existing skill doing so working with something of interest is likely to be more rewarding overall than spending time on something of little or no interest.

photo credit: tiffa130

Now I fully appreciate that some may not agree with me here and even those who do may have difficulty persuading their employer that spending time with their corporate version of Monarch pursuing personal interest projects is going to be of benefit to the company!

However if you are lucky enough to have access to a copy of Monarch, yours or a company copy, with which you can spend time on personal interest projects then I would whole heartedly recommend doing so if only for the variety of functionality you are likely to need to use. It’s a great way become familiar with features you may be able to apply in you work but had never had the opportunity to discover why.

Plus you may find some new ideas for analysis to suggest to your employer.

I know of at least one personal project that involved analysis of TV schedules for recording purposes. (As I recall, though I may be corrected about that.)

I do quite a lot of photography and use an editor that saves its edit information in a jpeg file along with text based information about where the original file resides. There are times when I find it necessary to move files (which the reference information can deal with if both files still reside in the same folder) and rename them (which will break the link even if they are in the same folder.) It’s possible to re-establish the connection, even to a different folder, provided you know which was the original file and where it is. I can use Monarch to quickly access the cross-reference information from the edit files and list links to make life easier. (Even better would be to allow the cross-reference to be corrected and then re-write the file but of course Monarch is not expecting to be saving jpg files!)

It occurs to me that there may be similar not-so-obvious applications for Monarch within a business environment.

Another useful source of experimental data is, as you might expect, the internet. Many organizations, especially government organizations, are allowing direct access reporting. Some private organizations too – banks allow you to download your account transactions for example, telcos offering electronic access to billing and so on. There may be some interesting analysis to be taken from those sources.

The UK Meteorological Office makes some long-term weather measurement data available for a selection of sites on a site-by-site basis. The data for each site can be downloaded as a text field and modeled with Monarch. There are a few format challenges to deal with – good practice for a modeler.

Once the files are downloaded they can all be opened and a large table of results can be obtained offering excellent opportunities for manipulating the various fields into summaries and graphs and deciding whether the weather has done anything odd from time to time in the last century or so.

Another Government site offers a fairly comprehensive report generation front screen for some of its database to do with Renewable (Energy) obligations Certificates. For full details one needs to grab another file from a different part of the site and then link the two together – good practice for external linking.

Once linked the potential for observing the progress of Renewable energy development, geographic location, its rated capacity and how much electricity is provided month by month becomes apparent, though not without a few challenges that require some calculated fields to ‘normalize’ the data and deal with a few anomalies. And of course such challenges are all good experience for a Monarch modeler with potential for spill-over of the techniques used into full business benefits for an employer.

I could imagine that other people might be working on share value reports, property listings, football statistics, etc. Any number of interesting projects that help modelers to enhance their skills and knowledge and provide insights that could likely benefit an employer.

What possible objections could the boss have?

So who else has their own pet projects that Monarch makes easy (or could do if it was available)? Post some examples in the comments and let’s see where that might lead us in the discovery of new ways to excel with Monarch.

I need to say a huge “Thank you!” to Grant for his time and efforts and for continuing to share his passion for Monarch with us.

I’ve been known to use Monarch on disk directory listings to assist with finding files on large volumes quickly and in the past have impressed my realtor with databases created from PDF files that he’d supplied. As Grant asks, what kinds of non-traditional tasks have you come up with to excel with Monarch?