Sid Arora

Every organisaton and team that produces or consumes data should be doing it under certain rules and guidelines. These rules and guidelines should be created to ensure that all data is: - coherent - accurate - reliable - easily available - easily and accurately interpreted These rules also help in situations where there are anomalies or inaccuracies. The rules (aka governance) helps find the root cause and fix quickly. Without these rules, it becomes very tough and time consuming to find the root cause and the required fix.

To meet your organisation's data needs, the first step is to understand the need and the requirements. And while you're gathering these requirements, it is important to focus on the need or the problem and not the solution. A lot of data consumers, when asked for requirements, share the output they're after i.e a chart, dashboard, visualisation, etc. Instead of the output, they should focus on the problem they're trying to solve with the data.

Some of the biggest challenges freelancers face: 1. Lack of business context. 2. Limited access to data and data infra Business Context: when you're doing analytics with the goal of creating insights and decisions, it is important to think of data and insights in the context of the business problem. And as freelancers (or outsiders) it is tough to have that context holistically. This makes analytics more tedious, and less effective. Data and data infra: large organisations have complex data infrastructure, and without access to comprehensive documentation, it is tough to be productive quickly. Understand the data structure, infra is critical to be able to create meaningful insights.

Reliability means different things to different people. The most important thing is to define "reliability" so that that it makes sense to everyone involved i.e. data consumers and data producers. Once there is a universal definition, it is important to set out clear deliverables, owners, and timelines. Each person/team involved should know what, how, when they contribute to reliability. Finally, build processes and checks to support reliability. These processes should help everyone when something goes wrong, there are questions, there are requests, etc. For a system to be reliable there needs to be trust in the consumers of the system. And having processes to increase collaboration and transparency increases trust in the system.

Sharing feedback (and recognition) just for the sake of it does good to no one. In fact, it does more bad than good. The best way to be authentic and also show it is: 1. Be detailed and specific in your comments 2. Allow them to ask questions about your comments 3. Help them understand "why" you think something was good

Great tips. I want to double click on the aspect of "don't wait till the end of the month/year" The only way they will truly appreciate recognition is when it is done in context. Sharing positive feedback with them right after their action is more helpful than sharing it at a later time. As a leader, I share feedback immediately. I ensure I give specific (not generic) comments. For ex: "Good presentation" is not as useful as "I loved how you used a detailed diagram to clearly articulate such a complex problem on slide 4"