Learnings from Working Analytic Projects for Legacy Corporations
It’s a great time to be alive if you are into data science. Every year more companies are embracing the power of data analytics, which means more job opportunities for us. This also is a new opportunity for you to use your experience to lead an implementation in a business that want to be data driven, a very sexy keyword these days. I have been lucky enough to have experience working for different industries that were at different levels of development, regarding their data implementations, and have to say it’s been pretty fun. Now, if you are responsible to build a data science team for an old legacy business, the challenge is big, but hopefully so will be the amount of learning, and why not, the amount of the paycheck.
I’m going to try to make a list of some of the biggest challenges I faced when trying to build a data science team for an old legacy corporation. Some of these experiences happened in between works for small start-up like businesses, an opportunity that’s probably total opposite to this one. I will try to revive my biggest headaches:
What the hell is data analytics?
We all have heard this before and it’s not exactly because is an old corporation we are working with. Most people don’t get data science, but especially people that has been working the same job for over 10 years for the same corporation that don’t know data. You will feel like an alien and will learn to explain what you do in very simple terms. Here is very important to create a very simple and visual presentation of what you are trying to do and be clear of how that brings value to each business owner. Making those key players understand you and get them to share their knowledge will open the doors for a smoother implementation.
Their version of a dashboard is not what you are used to
So in this first couple of meetings one of the most important things is to understand the current state of the business regarding data and reports. You have to remember this is an old legacy business and lower your expectations. The normal scenario is to see a million different excel sheets with a bunch of data in them. All reports look different and they all were stored in each individual hard drive. The data was product of manual extraction straight from the data source and paste in excel sheets. All business owners describe the process of creating those reports and is the old same issue: 80% of time creating reports, 20% analyzing it. They spend so much time extracting data from all sources and putting them together in a decent looking excel sheet that there was barely time to analyze anything and draw insights.
Patience is the key…lots of it
In a big old corporation, everything takes more time than expected. I mean I waited two full weeks to have access to the platforms I was going to extract data from. That was two full weeks and many talks with different people trying to get to the person that could help me in this matter. Nobody really cared that much about its data sources before. Another thing that really sucks is that the internet access is restricted. That means sometimes I wanted to download some software to help me in my task and I needed to open a ticket for the IT team. It took about 3 days for that ticket to be resolved!! I mean, it would take me like 3 minutes to install xmind on my laptop but never mind.
Show me that Data Magic!
No surprise here, all business owners have big expectations about data magic(I mean science). I’m going to build this new team of aliens and solve all problems with our data driven super powers. Then you look at the data you are going to be working with and it’s a whole mess. There’s no consistency, integration between platforms or quality in all this big data. You realize this is going to take a while and will need to make another simple and very visual presentation explaining the magnitude of this mess and how long would it take to finish the whole thing based on that. They have to understand that this step is the main thing we need to take care of since nothing can be built if we don’t do this the right way. Picking a small business case for a pilot could be the way to go here to have something to present quickly and open the doors for scaling. Years of generating data without any kind of strategy could be very costly indeed.
Meet our corporate partners
You dreamed about getting all the cool platforms used by all those cool companies. Then you are brought back to reality. The business is a Microsoft partner so it’s all about Power BI, Azure and Skype. Anyways is hard to win this fight, still sucks that you won’t be able to use AWS, Slack or any other thing in your wish list. Try to fight it a little bit and see what happens; probably you will need approval from 10 different people, which will take like 3 months. If you want to move faster just do your best with what’s available and adapt.
Corporate politics are fun
When you work for a small start-up like business is all about moving fast. The good thing is that you will probably have most of the control, and empowerment to do this, which is cool because for better or worse is all on you. On the other side, when you are in an old corporation things don’t really move fast. If you want to, at least, move at a medium speed, you need to become good at playing the corporate politics. Be cool to people, so they help you, invite them for lunch and help them out in little things so you can win people over. You also need to be good at the follow-up game with emails and messages, since many people will not like to be doing something out of their recurrent daily task or just are resistant to changes. Having big executives in the C level to buy your proposal is also key to your success since is proven that without it your project is most likely to fail.
Optimist conclusion
There are good things with working corporate jobs too, like big budgets, resources and facilities. The slow pace could work on your side when projects get complicated. Also keep in mind that if you made it, against all the obstacles and bureaucracy, you will make it anywhere. Most of the learning in life comes from difficult experiences and after conquering them, everything else will look like a piece of cake. So don’t get too scared with those old legacy, run by baby boomers, corporations, just take the challenge and be prepared.
