This post continues one of my favorite themes, shaping a data team. Find more articles on this thread here:
Simon Sinek, the famous American author and speaker on leadership, wants you to find your purpose in life. To do that, he recommends asking a close friend why you’re friends. They might struggle at first, but eventually, they’ll tell you why you’re important to them. They might say something like, "You make me a better person," or "I don’t know what I’d do without you."
Knowing your “why” matters not just in your personal life, but also for your data team. I want to help you find the “one thing” your data team gives the people at your company. I managed corporate data teams for thirty years, so I know how much this matters. No other business team spends as much time justifying its existence as a data team.
In most other corporate jobs, people know exactly why they exist: they design products, take orders, or close the books. Data and analytics teams don’t have that luxury. They’re constantly under pressure to prove their value. They don’t just do the work, they also explain it, because people who haven’t worked with a good data team before don’t know how their work connects to business outcomes.
Before building your data team, see if you can answer this basic “why” question. That will also lead you to important “what” and “how” questions.
Knowing Your Why, What, and How
Why does your data team exist? Your data team exists to improve every decision your company makes.
Every team and every leader expects your data team to remove friction from all their decision-making. That’s an incredibly challenging and subjective goal. Your only hope to meet that expectation is to embrace it. It forces you to manage all your company's data needs, not just analytics.
If you don’t get the answer to this “why” question right, your data team will become just another IT utility. That will frustrate the team, because they see people’s expectations (improving decisions), but don’t see you standing behind them when they try to drive positive change in your company. They’ll lose their sense of direction and burn out.
No other team connects the dots between the work of everyone at your company and the decisions they expect the data to improve. You need a data team, not another help desk.
What makes data work unique? Data work requires creative vision.
There’s nothing boilerplate about data and analytics. The work of a data team is just as dynamic as your product teams or any other creative team in your company. They start by understanding how people think and recognizing the urgent decisions they face, then they align data with that vision. They don’t always solve problems with data; often, they help business teams fix their processes.
Most IT projects use generic software to help your company standardize its work. Your manufacturing company (so the thinking goes) doesn’t need to reinvent procurement work or the software to support it. Success usually means avoiding creativity at all costs for most IT teams, but creativity makes all the difference for a good data team. IT leaders who don’t understand this difference treat data work like any other IT project.
That’s why you need a data team: they think creatively, just like your business teams.
How does a team help? A good data team understands your business.
Creating a data team is like hiring a therapist. You know you’ve got issues, but do you really need to pay someone to help you figure them out? Yes, you need someone to give you frank feedback, someone with deep knowledge of your business, deeper knowledge of your data, and the strategies that connect them.
Once, my new boss immediately decided that my data team was way too large. He told me to cut staffing, but I slow-rolled that request. After a year of watching us constantly solving business problems (and not just writing reports like he expected), he started adding headcount to my team.
If you don’t appreciate the value of a data team that knows your business inside and out, you’ll constantly focus on reducing the cost of the team. Your data and decisions will remain disconnected. Companies fail at this connection so often that there’s a cottage industry making cartoon jokes about it.
That’s why you need a data team: they know your business from the inside out.
Matching Commitment
Many CIOs and CFOs don’t know that their commitment doesn’t match their expectations for their data team. Hopefully, my answers will help you appreciate how understanding their work changes your support for them. I spent my entire career learning to answer these questions and proving my case. I realize my answers set lofty goals, but I’ve also learned that a half-hearted commitment doesn’t work.
You can only meet your high expectations by going all in.
Great Stuff! I work in a finance team with a lack of good data & good systems, trying to run analysis for the CFO is a nightmare. Has made me come to respect data and systems. Also as FP&A, the idea of justifying your value rings true...