With the rapidly changing economic environment, many businesses may be putting capital projects on hold and this may include major data initiatives impacting your team. This presents a great opportunity for Data leaders to effectively marshal their OPEX resources to ensure their teams are setup for success when projects resume. It’s also a great list to keep your team members engaged in meaningful work amidst challenging remote working conditions. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of 5 initiatives I recommend:

1. Facilitate data-driven scenario planning and wargaming efforts

World leaders across the globe are managing the COVID-19 crisis using data (amongst other things :)). Your business is no different. It needs to use data to manage through and post this crisis. Parts of your organisation may need to simulate various scenarios e.g. sales, marketing and operations (hardship, collections etc) functions. Specialist skills in your team can facilitate various scenario planning activities across your business that may or may not have appropriate management information to make those decisions. Your business may already have mature Data platforms and Analytics environments but the current situation is fluid and many business scenarios haven’t been considered before and hence the analytical assets may simply not exist. Engineers, analysts, data scientists can all help with data acquisition, analysis, visualisation and modelling. Progress over perfection, quick n dirty over shiny…..

2. Repay technical debt

If vital capital works (projects) are on hold; your opex (team salaries) is best spent repaying technical debt your team may have had to take on during project delivery. A quick heuristic I’ve used is to look through incident data for the last 120 days. This provides a view on failures your team spends most time recovering from. These solutions can be refactored for stability, scale and realiability. Do you need to retire fragile pipelines and replace them with new patterns? No one gets time to repay tech debt; a slowdown in projects may be the right time to address this.

3. Automate and Instrument your platforms

Every Data leader I’ve ever met wants to automate as much of their data assets as they can but few are afforded the budget to do it properly. The same goes for instrumentation. By instrumentation, I mean the logging, alerting and monitoring capability required to sustainbly support your data assets in production. Now is a good time to both automate as much of your delivery lifecycle as possible as well as bake in the required instrumentation in to uplift the overall observability of your data platform.

A good place to start might be your development lifecycle. How are your teams deploying to production? How mature is your CI process?

On instrumentation, a good place to start is false positives on alerts. How many alerts in production didn’t actually require a team member to fix something. Most teams have a myriad of false positives in their alerting infrastructure that can now be removed/added to.

4. Recalibrate your operating model

Is your team setup in an optimal way to meet the needs of your business stakeholders? How does your team manage demand and prioritise? Does your team need to evolve it’s ways of working in light of new approaches? Regardless of the size of your team, chances are you could further optimise your operating model to better service your stakeholders.

A good place to start is to review your service catalog. Do you still provide services and support for assets listed on it? Does your service catalog need a refresh? Most do.

5. Upskill your team

Last but not the least; don’t forget to invest in your team. If you’re in the fortunate position to not have to let go any of your team then it may be the right time to afford them the time to pick up new skills whilst working remotely. Your team is probably worried about many things (their job included) and many are trying to juggle home schooling with their work. Working remotely is a great way to engage in online self paced learning courses - many of them are completely free.

A good example is Google’s Cloud training which is currently available at no cost to everyone. AWS has moved to online proctoring of their certification exams and this may be a good opportunity to get the team some cloud skills.

How are you managing your team differently through this crisis? What initiatives are you focussed on right now? Leave a comment below.