How to move faster as a data team.

This week is a series of quick hits to help your data team deliver data more effectively. Outcome-driven data teams know how essential the speed and efficiency of your team is.

If you have at least one full-time data person on your team, these are fundamentals to make you successful. If you have multiple full-time data people, then you are losing ground if you ignore any of these areas.

At the basics, a data team should operate with three things:

• Source Control

Data teams work with code and files. They are constantly changing those files and code bases. Source control is a type of software that allows you to keep a details record of changes and versions of your code base.

• Environment Strategy

A restaurant has a kitchen and a dining room. A place where food is prepped and a place where food is served. These are environments, often called Development (dev) and Production (Prod).

• CI/CD

Moving food from the kitchen to a guest’s table is the process of delivery. It requires integrating food from different parts of the kitchen (protein, vegetables, starch, etc.) onto the same plate. Then that plate goes through a series of checks before it’s delivered to the table. This is called Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD).

In the coming days, I’ll go into more detail about how these operate, why they are important, and how you can take your first step.

It was good to see today,

Sawyer

from The Data Shop