If you want to improve your company’s data management you’ll have some convincing to do. Read below to find out where to start and how to do it.
You have a great vision of how things could be. Of course you do, you’re ahead of the game and you enjoy the exploration, but your colleagues… not so much. If only they’d see past their job description you would all be much better off.
It’s a common scenario. We all fall in love with our ideas and think everyone else should accept them blindly. The thing is, it doesn’t matter what your title is or the position in the company, for best results you still have to get people to buy into your idea.
Since data management, whether we’re talking about a basic integration or some fancy reporting, is the result of an IT project you might overestimate the importance of the technical solution. Technical people see the bytes and the tools and forget about the people that have to take time out of their busy day to learn a new way of doing things.
The success of any data management project is dependent on how well people adopt the new solution. If you spend resources to build the fanciest integration that no one is using, the end result will be worse than nothing.
Take your eyes off the screen and look to the people around you in the company. Who is in pain? Who’s overworked because of lack of data. I’ve seen huge enterprises where not even the regional managers had real time data. Oh, the horror. The easiest approach is to talk to your closest peers and see what hurts they have. After you decide on what problem you can solve for them, recruit them for a tiny, pain free experiment.
Your visions may be grand, but you need to start small. Remember the ‘pain free’ part.
Like in all things business and software, it’s best to focus on a minimum viable solution. What’s the easiest solution that would prove valuable to the people you’re trying to help? Can you start off with a script? Can you start with some Excel magic? Once you get the ball rolling you’ll have the buy-in you need to grow the initial solution into something more sophisticated.
When your starter project is up and running there will be positive results to brag about. The goal is not just to brag, but to show others what’s possible. It will be much easier for your coworkers to look in their own backyards for opportunities for improvement, now that they have the confidence that there is a solution.