Deliver value.
Yup, that’s the summary, deliver value.
Seems simple, right?
Hardly. In many organizations, data teams fulfill requests for technical challenges and deliver them to “the business”. That’s it. That’s all they do. Eventually those requesting things don’t get exactly what they want on time on budget or on feature, so they go to third party apps or hire consulting firms. Let this continue long enough, and the data team is sidelined, or worse, downsized. This a result of the team not performing.
But what is a data team? How does it achieve high performance?
Many will hyper concentrate on the minutia of the job. The prior 9 rules I posted, and they’re important. But that’s not what high performing data teams are all about any more than automotive design is about wrenches and screwdrivers.
Which gets me to “the business”. Many in our industry see “the business” as virtually everyone in the organization except them. Accounting, “business”, marketing, “business”, tech support, “business”. Data guy: “servant”.
We need to break this mentality. I don’t deliver insights to the business, I AM the business. My job is just as integral as anyone else’s. Maybe more. And to get there, we need to flex muscles beyond data modeling, data transfer, data etc.
We’re force multipliers, that’s our calling. An accountant is capable of a certain amount of output. An accountant with a competent data team can do the same as 20 accountants. Choose any role in the organization, and we can help them deliver 10x what they would without us.
To do that, we need to cast off our engineering hats and do something very uncomfortable for many. We need to get very social. At the end of the day, data management is just a social exercise. Managing relationships with people, their ideas, what they know, and how to exploit it for advantage. The data’s just an inevitable side effect.
And when you understand your organization’s individual teams, their pains, their strengths, their challenges; then you can employ all the amazing technical resources you have at your disposal and push forward. Without this, you’re just completing tasks which may or may not deliver value.
There’s an exercise I’ve done repeatedly as part of my onboarding at a number of companies. Shadow one person from each division/team in the company for a day. It might seem uncomfortable at first, but amazing things happen. You’re not in their management chain, and you’re the data monkey so you already know all the info about them. This creates an environment where they’ll be more honest with you than their own teammates. They’ll give up the goods on what works, what doesn’t, the processes, what we’re trying to achieve etc.
And remember, just like everyone else in the organization, you can’t deliver value unless you understand the organization.
You ARE the business.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-harmon-a910b74/