Data Analysis

CIMP · 50 questions

• A council briefing asks how many active library cardholders the city has, but nobody has defined what active means. What should the analyst do first?
• A public-works lead wants a monthly summary of how many service requests were opened and closed, not an investigation into why spikes occurred. Which analytic aim fits?
• A call center wants a forecast of next month's contact volume, while a separate team is explaining why last month spiked. How should an information-management practitioner separate those aims?
• A public dashboard truncates the y-axis so a one-percent change in recycling diversion looks like a steep cliff. What visualization practice should the team follow instead?
• An analyst prepared twelve charts for a budget workshop, but the decision is whether to extend Saturday library hours. How should the briefing be structured?
• Billing complaint volume rose after a rate change. Structured root-cause analysis traces the spike to a bad rate-table deploy rather than customer behavior. What does this illustrate about analysis practice?
• Five analysts each maintain a separate Excel pivot of revenue for the same municipal enterprise fund, and the totals disagree in every council packet. What risk does unmanaged spreadsheet analysis create?
• A department proposes tracking social-media likes as its primary service KPI, while completed service SLAs already exist. Which metric choice better supports civic performance management?
• Citywide average complaint rates look stable, but neighborhood segments show large gaps. What analysis practice should the team apply before concluding performance is equitable?
• A briefing notes that park visits and ice cream sales rise together and concludes that ice cream sales cause park visits. What analytic caution should the information manager apply?
• A transit satisfaction survey shows rising scores, but unhappy riders appear more likely to abandon the survey mid-way. What missingness concern should the analyst raise?
• A city dashboard contains thirty charts but names no decision owners or actions when thresholds breach. What critique should an information-management practitioner make?
• Before modeling membership churn for recreation centers, what should the analyst verify first about the source data?
• Permit backlog looks stubborn when measured only as today's queue length. What alternate view better explains process health over time?
• After a process change, a quality team watches weekly defect rates for unusual shifts rather than reacting to every small wiggle. What diagnostic monitoring mindset does this reflect?
• A city staggers a new permit web form to some applicants while others still use the legacy form, then compares completion rates. What comparative-evaluation caution applies?
• Geospatial analysis of pothole reports produces conflicting maps because street centerlines and address points disagree across systems. What prerequisite should the analyst emphasize?
• An executive storyboard for a funding decision should stay concise and actionable. Which structure best fits?
• Self-service BI is rolled out without a shared glossary, and teams soon publish conflicting definitions of on-time. What balance should information management enforce?
• An overtime hours distribution shows extreme outliers. What should analysts do before dropping those points?
• A time series of municipal water usage shows swings that analysts want to interpret as demand changes alone. What should they account for when reading the series?
• Supervisors need today's permit queue for staffing, while directors need multi-year intake and clearance trends for strategy. How should analytic products be matched to purpose?
• Association mining on service requests finds that tree-trim tickets often appear near sidewalk-repair tickets. What is the appropriate next stance before changing policy?
• Web analytics show heavy drop-off in the online permit application funnel. What condition must be true before those funnel insights reliably inform UX fixes?
• A public dashboard team can show neighborhood-level service metrics or row-level resident records. Which publishing practice aligns with privacy-minded analysis?
• A city budget office cannot rerun last year's cost-driver notebook for an audit because library versions and input parameters were never recorded. What practice should the information manager require next?
• A parks survey uses 1–5 Likert scales, yet a dashboard reports average satisfaction as 3.847291. What reporting problem should the information manager correct?
• Economic development leaders want metrics they can manage mid-year, but the only published KPI is last year's citywide economic impact estimate. What should the information manager add?
• A citywide dashboard lets users drill from an enterprise KPI to a department and then to a team, but filters reset at each level and comparisons stop making sense. What analytic UX requirement should be enforced?
• After a new inspection workflow launched, an analyst picks a post-launch week with unusually low backlog as the 'baseline' and reports a huge improvement. What baseline practice should the information manager insist on?
• A 311 analytics pilot proposes auto-tagging free-text service notes to prioritize neighborhoods, but the corpus mixes languages and informal slang. What caution should guide next steps?
• An analysis finds a clear intake bottleneck in licensing, but the deliverable is only a slide deck with no owner assigned to try a fix. What should the information manager require to close the loop?
• Parks planners survey only weekday downtown office visitors about weekend trail use and conclude citywide demand is low. What sampling problem should the information manager flag?
• Two BI tools both show 'active customer' counts for the same utility program but disagree by thousands. What should the information manager escalate first?
• Budget planners ask for a single exact revenue forecast, but key drivers such as grant awards and permit volume are uncertain. How should the information manager structure the analysis?
• A public safety heatmap on the open data portal uses color intensity with no legend or units, and residents cannot tell what the colors mean. What visualization standard should be required?
• For a sensitive equity study, analysts keep trying new cuts until a stark disparity appears, then plan to publish only that cut. What integrity practice should the information manager require?
• Exploratory work shows that duplicate and missing source records explain most of an apparent performance spike, yet modelers want to proceed with a complex predictive model anyway. What sequencing decision is correct?
• An operations manager disputes an analyst's on-time metric chart, insisting the numbers 'feel wrong.' How should they resolve the disagreement?
• Public works wants to judge winter road-treatment performance by comparing this February to January, which routinely has different storm patterns. What comparison approach should the information manager recommend?
• A public health briefing presents sample-based rates as exact citywide counts with no ranges or caveats. What communication practice should replace that approach?
• Self-serve users keep exporting spreadsheet extracts that live for months as unofficial shadow marts with stale figures. What governance response fits?
• A service-request KPI spikes overnight. Before proposing staffing changes, what diagnostic structure should the analyst apply?
• A partner agency shares a dashboard the city wants to republish, but it arrives with no metric definitions or freshness notes. What standard should analysts enforce?
• A predictive pilot for inspecting rental properties proposes features that directly encode protected demographic attributes without ethics review. What should the information manager do?
• In a service redesign meeting, one vivid constituent story is used to override a representative dataset that shows a different primary bottleneck. How should the information manager guide the group?
• A 311 call center capacity plan is built only from last month's total call count, ignoring when calls arrive and how long agents spend per contact. What inputs should the analysis include?
• After winter ends, the city never compares snow-response forecasts to what actually happened, and the same planning misses repeat. What analytics-lifecycle practice should be added?
• Leadership proposes a opaque weighted 'livability index' as the primary public accountability KPI, though simpler transparent service metrics already exist. What preference should the information manager advocate?
• An executive asks why analytic recommendations keep failing even though dashboards look polished. What integrated view should the information manager emphasize?