The ROI of Doing The Hard
Throughout my career, I've always been told the value of "thinking like a business owner". This is true when I was in IT as a Project / Program Manager and is certainly true now as a Business Intelligence Developer.
As a new and up and coming Analyst I was taught that the first step in any analysis is to think about what the business needs. What problems might they have? What decisions do they make and what information do they need to make better and more efficient decisions? This thinking drives the entirety of my work.
I'll never forget the work we did last summer on what ended up being the most complex report to date - Technician Productivity. On the surface, it's a simple ratio of hours worked / available hours. Simple. Until you start getting into the definitions of both of those terms. It quickly spiraled into a host of rules and exceptions to rules - not unlike the English language. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say it spun up a very intricate web of logic.
Throughout the process we continuously focused on the business need. It. Was. Hard. It. Was. Tedious. The validation of the final work took two solid weeks of head to head comparisons and we had to either match the existing report or explain ANY variance(s). We eventually got it all done and the business accepted the report. I'll never forget that effort.
Over six months have passed since that report was published for the first time. There hasn't been much feedback until this week when I got a couple questions about some edge cases. It was easy for me to respond to the questions because we did all that hard work long ago.
Then something unexpected happened - my responses triggered a conversation. Not just any conversation - a data driven conversation. The metrics in this report had been calculated and reported for years and no one ever questioned them. Now we have a Branch Manager that understands the metrics in a way he never did before and asked questions about those definitions. Finance jumped in to add clarification and offered suggestions. These conversations are the conversations of a data driven organization. How cool is that?
I share all that to make the point that it pays to do the hard, tedious, challenging work up front because it makes things easier later on. The opposite is also true - take the easy route now and it'll be very hard later on.
When presented with a choice between the hard way and the easy way - choose the hard - every time. It'll pay off handsomely later on and in ways you can't even imagine.
