First post of SAS 4 Marketers

The first blog of SAS 4 Marketers:
The goal of this blog is to share SAS ideas and techniques with programmers and analysts who work for marketing departments.
I have worked for financial companies, telecom companies and retailers and my experience has shown that there is no place on the web for exchanging SAS programming techniques that deal with real work problems in the marketing world.  What I mean by "real work problems" is the area of a programmers job between the SAS solution and the publishing of the solution to their client (i.e. the marketing department).
My hope is to share my experience and help others transition from a marketing department request to supplying the marketing department the answers they need.

This first blog will start simply with getting organised.  It has nothing to do with SAS, rather it offers a way to organize your projects, data and code so that you can easily find it at a later date when the marketing department asks you to redo the project.
Below is a sample of folders across two projects.  For every project, I create these folders as places to hold all of the pieces I need to complete each task.


Here a description of every folder and how I use them.

• 2014: Is the year I created the project.  It is important to have your projects divided into yearly folders because a lot of marketing campaigns are annual and it is important to separate them from year to year.
• 01 Retention Campaign:  This is the name of the project with the number prefix representing the month you created it.  Make sure your name is descriptive enough that you recognize it from other projects.  I know the last sentence was very obvious, but it is easier said than done.  If a project is an ongoing project and occurs monthly or quarterly, then you want to think about a name that easily changes with each version of the project as well as coinciding with the jargon that is used by your client.  Remember, you will be coming back to this project a few months or even years later when the marketing department sends you a request that sounds like "Can you recreate that list of customers you made for us in January?  It was for retaining our customers."  The prefix is important because people refer to projects by the date they occur and if you have a prefix that identifies the month it was created your life will be easier.  One note on the prefix, use 01, 02, 03, 04 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4 because this will sort your projects in chronological order.  A sorted list of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 can come out as 10, 1, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4 etc. in some versions of windows.
• Code:  This is where you store your code.  It keeps it in a separate place so you can see all of your versions of code that occurred for the project.  When I name my code, I always give it a descriptive name and follow it with a suffix of the date it was last saved.  This a a good way to  maintain version control of your code.  It also ensures you don't overwrite earlier versions of your code.  The date should be in the format of YYYYMMDD to maintain chronological order when sorted.  So my code tends to be named like this "RetentionCampaign20140211.sas".  Now I know the code was last save on February 11, 2014 and if that is the most recent date, then I know it is the most recent version.
• Data:  This is a place for all of the data that was inputted for the project.  For example if marketing gives you a list of customers that you need to input into SAS and manipulate, then store the data in this folder.  This is important because it separates the data from the output you are going to create and it keeps a record of exactly what marketing gave you, which may be important later on.
• Output:  Store everything you send to marketing in output.  It is advisable to date stamp each file with a date suffix described in the Code section.  It is important to only store what was sent out in this folder.  Some projects require you to create many files before you get to your final file and that is why it is important to store only what was sent out, because months later marketing will come back and ask for the file you sent them.  If your Output folder is full of work files then it will be difficult to find exactly which one you sent.
• Work:  This is where you store all of the files that you created during your project.  Think of it as that messy drawer in your kitchen that has no particular place.  Nobody will see these files so put whatever you want in here.  It is for your eyes only.  Dump everything in here and once you have created the final file you want then move it to the output folder.  Months later, when marketing asked for that file you created for them, you will be thankful you separated your work from your output.

If you keep to this basic organisation you should be able to find what you need months later when the file is required again for analysis.  I would love to hear how you organize your folders for projects and why you do it your way.