Ch 5 Practice — Q3 Revenue vs Plan ======================================== The four-region revenue dataset behind Chapter 5's Practice with us problem in The Defensible Decision. One quarter that reads as fine, one region that missed by 15%, and a chart with every default decoration switched on so you cannot see the second thing for the first. Wholly synthetic. Any resemblance to a specific company's quarterly revenue is coincidental. The numbers are constructed so the aggregate looks unremarkable while one region misses badly, which is the condition the exercise depends on. Files ----- - practice-ch5-revenue-plan.csv — flat rows: four regions, revenue and plan with variances - practice-ch5-revenue-plan.json — canonical scenario contract, including both chart states - SCHEMA.txt — column definitions, headline numbers, design rationale What it represents ------------------ A Q3 revenue-by-region snapshot of the kind Copilot will generate a bar chart from without being asked twice. Four regions, actual against plan. The quarter came in at $31.7M against a $32.2M plan, a miss of under 2%. At the aggregate that is noise. Underneath it, EMEA finished at 85% of plan, $1.2M short, while Americas, APAC and LATAM all beat theirs. Chapter 5 shows the chart as generated, carrying every default decoration: a descriptive title, both axis labels, gridlines every $2M, a data-value label on all four bars, a legend keyed to four brand colours that duplicates the x-axis categories, a chart border, and a light-gray background fill. Nothing in it is wrong. It is simply carrying so much that the one fact worth acting on does not surface. The exercise ------------ Inventory every element on the chart into one of three buckets: - Encodes — carries data. Remove it and information is lost. - Helps read — carries no data but makes the encoding legible. - Neither — carries no data and does not help. This is what the removal pass takes. Then rebuild. The JSON records what the rebuild should look like under chart_states.decluttered: sorted by plan variance so EMEA leads, a plan reference tick per region, one accent colour on the EMEA bar, and a title that states the finding instead of naming the axes. Invariants (locked) ------------------- These are pinned by practice-ch5-revenue-plan-contract.test.mjs in the book repository, so any chart built from this data reproduces the print figure exactly: - Regional revenue sums to the quarter total; regional plan sums to the quarter plan - EMEA sits at exactly 0.85 of plan, short by $1.2M - EMEA is the worst performer against plan - Every other region beats plan - Quarter variance stays under 2% — if this ever fails, the exercise no longer teaches what it claims to Scope ----- A practice-scope dataset, not one of the fourteen character datasets. No anchor character owns it; it belongs to the chapter's practice tier. Values are in $M at the same scale as nadia-q3-region, the other revenue-by-region dataset, so the two figures stay comparable across chapters. License ------- Released for teaching use alongside The Defensible Decision. Use freely.