Things that shouldn’t be automated

Automation and scalability isn’t ideal for every situation.

Things that should be automated and scalable:

• Code deployments

• Data pipelines

• Business Intelligence reports

• Version control for your codebase

• Data quality checks

You benefit from not having to think about these tasks. It’s a problem if you have to remember to do these things or they require tons of effort. Invest in automation and scalability. Automating them improves the quality of the output.

Things that shouldn’t be automated and scalable:

• Talking to business users about their use cases and data needs

• Architecture design sessions for data solutions

• 1-1 meetings with your team and/or manager

• Hiring team members

• Gaining executive buy-in for data projects and initiatives

These activities benefit from your direct emotional and mental engagement. Automating them degrades the quality of the output dramatically.

I regularly talk with customers who spend so much manual time on the top list, that the bottom list suffers.

Be intentional about what you want manual and what you want automated.

I’m here,

Sawyer

p.s. This email is a manual and personal task. Very little automation here. Just me sitting down each morning to write you an email and hitting send.