Design the whole, build the small.

What do you do with your big ambitious in your data team?

A New Year can fill you with exciting plans. Large scale projects to launch. Innovative initiatives to kick off.

Often, these ambitions can encompass multi-year timelines.

Two common points of failure I see along the way:

• Build the whole thing.

• Build lots of pieces.

Build the whole thing often fails because the train runs out of steam. Eighteen months after the Enterprise Data Warehouse project began there are no useable pieces yet. The developers are growing tired. The stakeholders are tired of waiting. And finances is done writing checks.

Build lots of pieces moves quickly and gets the users key use cases early and often. But with five teams building out individual use case solutions across the business, the long term attempts to integrate fail. It ends 18 months later with a fractured ecosystem thats painful to maintain and tempting to burn down.

The stakeholders want something useful sooner than 18 months. And in 18 months you want to have an integrated and coherent foundation.

Try this with your ambitions instead:

Design the whole, build the small.

Design and plan a long-term roadmap that will accommodate the larger business. But you build very small to start. Wholistic design with phases designed to deliver in weeks rather than quarters or years.

Keep your big ambitious.

We need your leadership and your dreams.

I’m glad you are here,

Sawyer

from The Data Shop