Data analysis · Manchester, UK

Data hides things. And there's a thrill in finding them, and in explaining how.

I'm Ibomeno. I work in airline customer service in Manchester, and I do data analysis on the side. Everything on this page I built in my own time, because when I see some interesting data I can't help digging into it. It isn't all analysis, either: if something piques my interest, or I can build something that makes my day-to-day easier, I'll build it.

About

My origin story

It's not as thrilling as Batman's, but Football Manager, if I'm honest.

Stay with me here. Imagine you're a lower table team with some bite and ambition for silverware, but you can't compete with the financial muscle at the top of the table. So what do you do? You look at the data for bargain players who overperform their attributes. The striker with poor finishing who still beats his xG. The slow winger completing a high number of take-ons and dribbles. The midfielder who doesn't look like much but has a high xA and leads in key passes and progressive passes. And that older centre-back who doesn't have the physique of his youth but is so mentally there that he has a 95% tackle success rate.

Did these sorts of players end up winning me silverware? Sometimes, but the other times I'd rather not talk about.

What kept me at it once I'd started was the logic of it, and the storytelling. Writing a query is a puzzle with a shape to it, and there's a very particular satisfaction in getting a join or a window function to do exactly what you meant instead of nearly what you meant. Then once I've found something, I like working out how to tell it: what comes first, what someone needs to see, and whether it wants a bar, a line or a scatter. I didn't expect to care about picking charts this much, but the wrong one costs whoever's reading it, and I've not got bored of that question yet.

Skills

What I work with

Grouped by what I use them for. No percentage bars, because I've never worked out what 80% at Excel is supposed to mean.

SQL

I have been writing SQL for about seven years, since university, and it is where most of the projects on this page start. Joins across a lot of tables, CTEs, window functions, and getting normalised source data into a shape you can actually answer a question with.

  • SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Multi-table joins
  • CTEs
  • Window functions
  • Subqueries

Cleaning & modelling

The part nobody sees. Getting the source data into a state you can trust, then building a model that answers questions instead of one that just holds the rows. Most of the mistakes I have caught in my own work were caught here.

  • Power Query / M
  • Star schema
  • Deduplication
  • Null & sentinel handling
  • Data quality checks

BI & visualisation

Dashboards built around the decision somebody has to make, not around every field that happens to exist in the table. The test I hold my own to is whether somebody could read one without me there to explain it.

  • Power BI
  • DAX
  • Drill-through
  • KPI design
  • Tableau
  • Parameters

Excel

Still where most business analysis really happens, whatever anyone says. I build workbooks assuming somebody else will inherit them, so the structure stays consistent and nothing breaks the first time a row gets added.

  • Power Query
  • Dynamic arrays
  • XLOOKUP
  • COUNTIFS
  • INDEX/MATCH
  • Pivot tables

Python

Still learning this one, mostly pandas. It is the reason DataBites exists, because the lessons I wanted did not fit the way I learn and building the thing turned out to teach me more than the lessons would have. I am not claiming more than that yet.

  • Pandas
  • Cleaning
  • Learning

Writing it up

Every project on this page has a write-up saying what I did and what I found, and most of them also say what I would not claim from it. Saying which bits the data cannot answer is part of the answer, and it is the habit I would most want a team to check me on.

  • Documentation
  • Stating assumptions
  • Flagging gaps
  • Plain English

AI-assisted analysis

I use generative AI tools as part of the workflow: drafting SQL and DAX, explaining code I have not seen before, debugging queries that will not run, getting cleaning steps written faster, and drafting and proofreading write-ups and reports. Prompting is the easy half. The half that matters is validating what comes back, because AI-generated code can run without an error and still answer the wrong question, and a well-written summary can still get a number wrong. DataBites was built this way, with every DAX answer checked against the same numbers worked out separately in pandas.

  • Generative AI
  • Prompt engineering
  • AI-assisted SQL & DAX
  • Code generation
  • Debugging
  • Report drafting
  • Proofreading
  • Output validation
  • Claude

Query sandbox

Pick a query. It runs against a small fake dataset sitting in the page.

Projects

Selected work

All of it is public and the code sits on GitHub, so you can go and poke at it. Open a card for the write-up or skip straight to the source.

SQL · Business modelling

Driver incentive scheme modelling

Two driver bonus schemes for a busy Saturday. Option 1 costs $1,050 and Option 2 costs $2,696, and only 2 drivers would get a bonus under Option 1 and miss out under Option 2. The more interesting find was a group of drivers neither scheme reaches.

  • SQL
  • Scenario modelling
  • Cost analysis
SQL · Window functions

NBA trends & performance, 1996–2023

Three things everyone says about the NBA, checked against 12,000-odd player seasons. Players with a usage rate over 30% had the best true shooting, not the worst, and part of the drop in average height since 2015 was the league changing how it measured players in 2019.

  • SQL
  • CTEs
  • Window functions
SQL · Exploratory analysis

COVID-19 global analysis

Deaths and vaccinations by country, joined on country and date. The main lesson was that no single death rate told you much, because the odds of dying if you caught it kept falling as treatment got better. Running vaccination totals showed how uneven the rollout was.

  • SQL
  • PARTITION BY
  • Joins
Excel dashboard set to the 2021/22 season: a full Premier League table with Man City top on 93 points, zones for the Champions League, Europa League and relegation, and a season summary naming the champions, European qualifiers and relegated clubs.
Excel · Power Query · Dynamic arrays

Premier League season dashboard

8,360 matches from 2000/01 to 2021/22, rebuilt into a league table for any season you pick. My favourite find: 2020/21, played without fans, is the only season where away teams won more games than home teams.

  • Excel
  • Power Query
  • FILTER & XLOOKUP
  • Dashboard

All repositories on GitHub

Experience

Where I've worked & studied

Where I am now and where I studied. The full history is on the CV.

  1. April 2023 — Present

    Customer Service Advisor

    British Airways Gold Guest List and Premier team · Manchester, UK

    Previously in the Gold and Change Booking teams

    • I sell flights, holidays and hotel bookings, and I've consistently met and beaten monthly sales targets of £60K to £150K.
    • I built my own Excel tracker to see how my sales were doing by category against target, because the numbers in the background didn't show me what I wanted to know. Old habits.
    • I noticed customers whose flights were cancelled in schedule changes kept getting rebooked onto flights hours earlier or later, even when a new flight had been added at almost the same time. I took it to management, and it led to a new policy letting us rebook those customers onto the closer flight free of charge.
    • I look after high-value customers' accounts, including their vouchers, rewards and benefits such as Gold upgrades and American Express Companion Vouchers, and build relationships they come back to.
    • I beat my average handle time target every month, while looking after 20 to 25 of BA's top-tier customers a day.
    • I've trained colleagues on our booking and reward systems, and picked up several Golden Tickets, which are awards from customers for going above and beyond.
  2. Graduated 2021

    BSc (Hons) Information Technology & Business Information Systems

    Middlesex University · First Class Honours

    Final-year project: researched YouTube addiction through user workshops, then designed and tested an alternative in Figma.

Full history on the CV

Contact

Let's talk

Hiring for any kind of role, or just wanting to complain about dashboards nobody reads. All welcome.

Email ibomenobasiekanem@gmail.com
CV

Full CV as a PDF

Download CV
Location

Manchester, United Kingdom

Open to all work options: on-site, hybrid or remote. Full right to work in the UK.

This opens a pre-filled message in your own email client. Nothing gets sent through this page and nothing is stored here.