Author Archives: admin

Make sure you apply what your expertise to your own practice

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captain_obvious

Source: https://twitter.com/obviouscapn

I strongly believe in documentation. As a project manger, I feel that’s I am in the best position to properly capture the twists and turns along the project path. Given this, it makes the most sense for me to at least do the initial drafts of the documentation. There may be times where technical resources need to provide more details around how something is implemented, but for the most part I know enough to provide the starting point. This applies to both business documentation and ongoing production support documentation. I consider this core to what I do as a professional when I manage any project, at work or on volunteer initiatives. After quitting one job, I stayed on for another 3 months to hire my replacement and ensure the documentation was complete and up to date. Three years later, after some personnel turnover, I was asked to come back as a subject matter expert. I resurrected this documentation, refreshed it and used it as the basis for addressing the questions.

Despite all that, my biggest take away from last week’s DrupalCon was that my business needs process to scale. Yes, I know that it’s obvious. I do this all the time for my client work, ensuring that someone could take over my projects with relative ease. In those scenarios, someone taking over would find an archive of project artifacts previously provided to the customer, a site with the project details including other relevant reference sources. The outstanding work would be documented per the client request (i.e. task lists, service tickets, etc).

I have even started this for processes that are outside of my core competencies. If it was new, I needed to document the process for me and my partner so we could reference it, measure it and update it as required. It’s all the other stuff I haven’t documented. To continue the example of someone taking over my client work, while they have the tools, they won’t have the instruction guide. They won’t know how I go about a project. They won’t know how often I communicate with the client or in what form. There won’t be a guide for what to do the first day they step in.

It’s disturbing that the things that are most obvious to us are often the things we overlook the most. Regardless of how valuable we think we are, we have to plan for the unexpected. This could range from tragedy like sickness or death or joyful opportunities like extended holidays in locales with limited connectivity (yes, those places still exist). We limit ourselves when we only share our talents externally. We need to also apply our expertise to our broader roles and organizations. In my scenario, building these processes for how I do what I do will allow my company to grow. For yours, you are adding value not just to external customers, but also creating significant value for the organizations we engage with.

I hope after reading this you think about your core competencies and whether you are truly practicing what you preach.

 

Recap & Top Lessons Learned from DrupalCon New Orleans

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DrupalCon New Orleans was the epitome of “work hard, play hard.” The days were spent in intensive, thought provoking sessions, the nights were spent at the multitude of social events.

Business Summit

Monday was spent as expected, at the Business Summit. Susan Rust coordinated this year’s event and focused on 3 key areas: recurring & repeat revenue, killer marketing & new clients and leading with ease. The day was planned with presentations by corporate industry leaders followed by small group discussions and subsequent presentation of the key take-aways.

While the information was interesting and valuable, the business summit tended to raise more questions than provided answers for us as a micro-business. For example,

  • How do you ensure that you don’t exert too much emotional (or other) investment on too few customers?
    • How do you do this when the same resources are working in and on the business?
  • Do you find or grow your talent? And how do you do this without distracting from the revenue that keeps your business afloat?

Two critical sentiments resonated with me for most of the conference:

  1. Scaling your business is about process, tools & business infrastructure.
  2. Spending too much time working in the business will prevent you from long-term health & success.

We closed out the day by attending the Opening Reception and started collecting our DrupalCon swag (for me it was t-shirts and some awesome drupal socks).

Conference Session

Tuesday was the official opening of the conference. It started with some early morning global entertainment with costumes, Drupal parodies & skits followed by the official kick-off keynote by Dries Buytaert.

My first session was all about data structures in Drupal. This is a pretty fundamental component, and plays to my internal data geek, so I thought it would be a good place to start my technical Drupal education. Ron Northcutt did a good job of describing the structures and providing guidelines for making better decisions. If you ever get tripped up on the terminology or want a starting point in your Drupal education, this presentation would be good for you to watch.

For the remainder of the day, I stuck mostly to the business track. I attended the critical metrics for your drupal business session, hosted by Michael Silverman (DUO) and Dave Terry (Media Current). These guys dove into resources, tips and metrics we should all understand and track for our businesses. Some key points and resources include:

  • Know your goal or exit plan from the beginning
  • “Master the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm” by Verne Harnish
  • “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel Pink
  • “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wickman
  • Don’t forget to measure your culture (presentation highlights ways to do this)
  • To scale your business, you need to be accounting on an accrual basis
  • Sales Tools: Geckoboard, CRMs, templates
  • “A Win Without Pitching Manifesto” by Blair Enns
  • Recruting Tools: JAZZ, DISC, Perform Yard
  • “TopGrading” by Brandford D. Smart
  • “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” by Bo Schembechler
  • “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie

I also attended Jeff Walpole’s session on why and how enterprises get involved in the open source community and the drupal showcase GE and FFW case study. I briefly attended the birds of a feather “BOF” (adhoc session) for small drupal shops before I had to head over to the Women in Drupal event. Approximately 200 people showed up before heading off to the other parties.

On Wednesday, I played hooky in the morning before attending Jeffrey “Jam” McGuire’s session on the value of Drupal 8 technical features. This was incredibly valuable to me and I would recommend taking the time to watch this presentation if you aren’t already immersed in Drupal 8. I also attended the diversity in tech session by Nikki Stevens and Karyn Cassio. They shared valuable stats and practical actions we can control in our own behavior, before opening the floor for an honest discussion.

Thursday is the official last day of the conference so is a bit shorter, leaving room for the closing ceremonies and time for contribution sprints. I attended Aimee Degnan’s session on prioritizing your scrum product backlog for Drupal work. The focus was balancing “keeping the lights on” with new product features for a site or group of sites over time. The biggest insight for me had more to do with how to apply a similar model to working on the business and working in the business.

  • Your business (like a single site) is comprised of: primary value creation; supporting systems with direct impact to value creation and supporting systems with indirect impact to primary value creation.
  • Like a project, there is some overhead associated with running your business as well as the application and review of reporting.

We often apply agile methodologies to our projects, but we haven’t been as effective on applying them to our business.

The next session was Jody Hamilton’s talk on growing your own talent. Jody shared her experiences build Zivtech’s talent. She provided tactical tools & tips on on-ramping, quality, recruitment methodologies and evaluations. The key to doing this successfully is process. The biggest argument small shops have for not pursuing this is struggling to balance workload capacity with training resources. Jody challenged this assumption, pointing out that focusing on the work at hand is a short-term initiative. For long-term viability of your business, it’s imperative to think long-term.

  • Developing the talent to keep your culture, philosophy and work are a requirement to scale your business.

My final session selection was easy. I attended Susan Rust’s margins & maseratis talk. There were so many key points in this talk that I think you’ll need to watch it. Susan started with these 3 directives for successfully scaling your business:

  • Be data driven
  • Measure over time
  • Develop processes

From a practical perspective, I learned we have a lot to do including:

  • Documenting everything we do to deliver value to clients
  • Document the tools we use to do them, measure them, report on them (yes, document ALL the tools..)
  • Measure everything..per project, per person, per organization
  • Make sure to focus (aka specialize). Don’t be everything to everyone.
  • It’s all about the margins! Businesses that want to grow focus on revenue where businesses that want to scale focus on margin. It’s not that revenue isn’t important, but it’s more about changes in revenue that are most critical.

And lastly, we attended the closing ceremonies and the Drupal 6 funeral procession, with brass band and police escorts as we shut down New Orleans streets.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my adventure at DrupalCon New Orleans. I know from others that there are quite a few sessions I missed. I’m planning on watching the recordings of those over the next couple of weeks. I’d also love to hear about your experience and take aways.

Preparing for my First Drupalcon

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I’m heading to my first Drupalcon in New Orleans next week. While I’m a very technical project manager who has worked on website implementation projects with content management systems or other integrations, I’ve never worked in or on a Drupal project. This is really my husband’s area of expertise.  Carson has been to several Drupalcons, but still spent quite a bit of time debating between the business and technical track. You can read his blog post on it if you’re interested in his thoughts. I struggled a bit with my own planning so I am hoping a blog post on it would help organize my own thoughts.

I attended Drupal GovCon last year where I participated in mostly the business sessions. I wrote about that experience too. Going into this Drupalcon, I have many of the same goals that I had last summer: learn more about Drupal and make some good contacts in the Drupal community. As I was looking through the different sessions, I did not want to hyper-focus on any one particular track as I have personal & professional interests in business, project management, women in drupal and the learning more about the technical side of Drupal. I’m not sure this aligns to the typical attendee. This made my initial pass through the different sessions a bit frustrating. I walked away thinking that there wasn’t a lot of sessions that interested me and concerned that I would be wasting my time. I was a bit more successful the second time around, and by that time the Birds of Feather “BOF” (adhoc sessions) were available.

Monday was easy! Carson participated in the business summit at last year’s Drupalcon and got a lot out of it. This year I’m participating in it, while he attends the government summit.  This is a great opportunity to learn from other Drupal agencies. Businesses in the Drupal community tend to really open up their books and processes and experiences in a way that other businesses don’t. I attribute that to the core principles of giving back if you participate in the open source community.

On Tuesday, I’m mixing up technical sessions with business ones. After my first Dries keynote, I start off my day with a session on understanding data structures and am definitely going to the session on how to get more involved in the open source community. Beyond that, I’m still bouncing between critical metrics for your business and teaching drupal to kids; case study on leveraging drupal to deliver business results beyond clicks, conversions & revenue and building a remote drupal shop. I’m also going to the BOF for small business owners to share ideas. Then we’ll head over to the Women in Drupal event we’re sponsoring.

Wednesday is focused on the business side of things. I’m hoping the writing great case studies for drupal.org will allow me to pick up some skills for writing great case studies for anyone. Then I’ll be learning about selling the value of new drupal 8 technical features, and finding my purpose as a drupal agency. There is only one time slot where I have not decided yet. Is it the session on Drupal community as an example of diversity in tech or implementing performance metrics and dashboards for your digital agency or productive collaboration of sales and project management as a means to drive customer satisfaction? Before we head off for more socializing, I’ll participate in the account management to customer success evolution BOF.

Thursday is the last day of sessions. I’m going to learn about successful drupal integrations then focus on growing talent & margins within your organization.

I am excited to participate and think I came up with a good schedule. Lucky for me, I’m not locked into any one of these and can easily bounce between sessions as the floor plan  & timing permits.

 

Balancing Agility with Process is Really Hard!

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Most of my professional experience has been in small, fast-paced organizations. I had one fairly short stint in a larger public company. During all these experiences, I’ve seen the constant struggle between agility and process. There are numerous studies that prove that companies need to react very quickly in today’s market in order to be competitive. Unfortunately, growth companies tend to pursue agility with pure disregard for process. McKinsey has done a few studies on this, here and here, that speak to the importance of agility but argue that the only way to achieve true agility is to have a strong backbone of structure and governance.

In my experience, the balance between agility and process (AKA structure) is very difficult to attain. When you are a company of 1 or 2, you do what works best for you. Hopefully there is some basic process around prioritization and execution, otherwise there might be a real struggle for viability. As you add additional resources it becomes more important to add some process. Resources need to understand the organization purpose (mission, vision, key performance indicators, etc) or everyone will be doing something different, making the whole very unstable.

Strong sales & organization leaders can overcome this, but they often do it at the expense of their own sanity. If a core group of people exert all their energy in developing sales and onboarding customers, they can compensate for the resources that are adding limited value. It’s at this point in the growth model where organizations struggle. It becomes apparent that some resources are severely underutilized while others are severely over-utilized. The focus of the conversation swings between the expense of training the under utilized resources or releasing the under utilized resources from the organization. In both these cases, the root cause has more to do with the process of onboarding resources. Does the organization invest the time to train the resources they have already or spend the time to find & train new resources? That depends on the resources and how they align to the organization. Some resources will be redeemable, while others are not.

Alternatively, there are many organizations that are so process oriented that they lose sight of agility. The focus becomes on making sure the process is followed, and the appropriate approvals are obtained. This is done at the expense of moving quickly.

Scale comes with being able to consistently deliver your product offering to your customers and add value in your area of expertise. If you have not designed a process around delivery or fully understand your product offering from your customer’s perspective (specifically how they derive value from your offering), you are likely to spend a significant portion of your time in fire fighting mode. Consequently, spending all your time fire fighting results in less time spent helping customers with the value initiatives.

I believe that there should be a balance between agility and process. Define a core set of processes that are critical to your product offering, set the groundwork for resources about why the organization exists (back to mission, vision & goals), but give them the space to make decisions and pivot as required.

 

 

Wisdom learned from the NOVA Ice Dogs Tier 2 U-16 Girls Team

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My 17 year old daughter competed at USA Hockey Tier 2 Nationals last weekend. This was the culmination of many years of hard work for the girls and the coaches. This was the third year that her team declared “national bound”, meaning they would compete for for the right to represent the Southeast division at the National competition. Going into this tournament, our team was ranked 31st in the country, and were scheduled to play the 1st and 2nd ranked teams. Needless to say there was quite a bit of excitement and nerves surrounding the competition. I think we all have a lot to learn about handling ourselves based on this experience.

Rank doesn’t mean much

As I mentioned, the Northern VA (NOVA) Ice Dogs were ranked 31st in the country going into the tournament. Throughout the entire season, the team has been playing teams up and down the east coast. These girls definitely played up, or down, to the level of their competition. We saw them be extremely competitive to teams in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey but then lose to teams they should have beaten locally. This tournament was no different. The girls lost their first game to the 2nd ranked team 0-6, won their second game  and then lost to the 1st ranked team by only 2 points (0-2). Going into this last game, the girls were nervous. It was an evening game so they had all day to dwell on it, but played their hearts out. They had several scoring chances and played solid defense. The girls left that game knowing they deserved to be at Nationals.

I think we’ve all had experiences where we weren’t the first choice. We may know this to be true, or worse, just be worrying that it’s the truth. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you ranked in the process, you got it. You earned it. Stop dwelling and move on to get the job done.

Keep your head held high

The team worked very hard to get to Nationals, playing more than 60 games in regular season. This is highly unusual for National bound teams, as they tend to be more select tournament-only players, playing on other teams during regular season. Our girls did it. They made it to Nationals, but lost. The girls walked out of the locker room after their last game with their heads held high. As they should!

We all have had experiences where we’ve done everything we can but it doesn’t work out. That’s really ok. Walk away from that experience with your head held high, knowing there was nothing more for you to do.

Tenacity & Determination

During the regular season playoffs, and then again during the Southeast division playoffs, the NOVA Ice Dogs had multiple games where the opposing team took the lead about half way through. In each of these games the NOVA Ice Dogs came back to win. They could have walked away, demoralized and out of the game. They didn’t. They fought back and succeeded.

The obvious moral to the story is to regroup and refocus when things aren’t going your way.

 

 

How do you Brand your Project?

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While I was looking for something to write about this week, I came across this blog on Branding your Project by Method123 Project Management Methodology. It got me wondering about my own projects and how actively, or subconsciously I do project branding.

At first I was hesitant to acknowledge that I actively branded my projects. However, as I thought about it more, I realized that everything I do to manage a project is done to effectively get the project to its finish line, and make it successful in the eyes of the project stakeholders. If the point, as the blog says, is “to associate an emotion or a feeling with your project”, then every deliberate action I take contributes to the positive project brand. This includes:

  • conscious communication, almost to the point of over-communication– There is a balance between airing dirty laundry and being honest about issues as they arise.
  • consistent and thorough documentation– the more you can document the project process and make available to stakeholders, users and those expected to support it builds credibility and goodwill.
  • building the bridge between business and technology-Removing perceived obstacles and making sure technical solutions meet the business needs results in better solutions, and happier stakeholders.
  • actively acknowledging hard work– project members, both from the implementation teams and the business teams, need to be recognized for a job well done. This could be as simple as thanking them for their flexibility as you manage meeting times across global resources. Or it could be for figuring out a really complicated problem.

I think establishing your project brand is a lot like the things you do to establish your personal brand. It reminds me of the phrase “do your job, do it well and you’ll be asked to do it again.” By doing the things you need to do as a project manager to effectively manage your project, you lay the groundwork for the project brand. Each artifact, milestone and decision point are opportunities to present the project in the best possible light. If you can’t, or choose not to, capitalize on those opportunities, you leave project perception up to fate. I would rather be deliberate in my message and my management, controlling the project image. You can do this successfully even when you need to deliver bad news.

So, what do you think? Do you actively or passively manage your project brand?

The Curse of Your Procrastination

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There are an abundance of articles on procrastination – ways to avoid it, reasons why it exists, etc. I wasn’t able to find many resources on how procrastination negatively impacts other people. When it comes to procrastination, It’s really not all about you! Your procrastination is impacting everyone you work and/or interact with.Procrastination Chart

As a project manager, this comes up quite a bit. The project manager diligently breaks down the work, assigns the baseline schedule and owns overall responsibility of making sure the work gets done. We rely on the project team to fulfill their responsibilities and ensure the work gets completed. If a single project team member procrastinates on any single task, it will have a trickle down effect on all other tasks that need to be completed. Procrastination by definition is the avoidance of doing tasks that need to be done. This does not include the scenarios where work goes more slowly as a result of a problem or new information. This is truly the work that a resource puts off because he/she just doesn’t want to do it.

While project managers know that this is a common enough occurrence, I think it’s human nature to assume your procrastination isn’t hurting anyone other than yourself. But in reality, it will impact anyone directly linked to you. A couple of days ago I got into an argument with my daughter for this exact topic. Her high school requires that each student fulfill 15 hours of community service during the course of the school year. While 15 hours over 10 months doesn’t seem that cumbersome, my daughter plays ice hockey September-March. She is on the ice 6 days a week and has to fit homework and other responsibilities on top of that.

Now that we are winding down hockey season, I asked her to conduct some research and  identify opportunities she could do over spring break. She promptly told me she “had it covered’ and would fulfill the hours, but when I pushed her for more details, she had nothing to offer. She assumed that I was pushing her because I didn’t trust her. That really had nothing to do with it. In prior years, we had to scramble to get everything done in time, rushing around in the last minute. Given my other projects and responsibilities, I need her to plan more effectively. I got quite frustrated with her as there is no real effort to do the research (the school provides a list of pre-approved organizations and activities). In this case, her procrastination doesn’t just have the potential for disrupting her grade, it will most likely disrupt my schedule as we have to cram 15 hours over the next month (and she doesn’t drive yet).

As you push off until later the thing you need to do today, please consider the impact you will have on those around to you.

3 Tips to Make Your Project Transitions Occur Smoothly

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At some point during the course of a project, a transition must occur. Ideally this doesn’t occur until the end of the project when you are transitioning from the implementation phase to the support phase. Unfortunately there are times when transitions need to occur during the implementation phase. Regardless of the scenario, I have found that there are a few things the Project Manager/Organization can do to make this transition go more smoothly.

  1. Establish a process for project artifacts (specific documents and central storage) – While each project may have slight variances to a set process, the more aligned the project documentation is, the easier it will be for a new team member to come up to speed. At a minimum I think this should include standard templates for project status including decisions, action items, upcoming goals and most immediately resolved items; project plans; statement of work & change orders; and support documentation that provides the technical details as well as business rules that impact the implementation (what will the support team need to know to manage the day to day operations of the implementation?).  The central repository for project documentation makes it easy for anyone to step in. They know exactly what has been transmitted and can see the progression of the project over time. Without these, time is wasted on finding the components rather than really digging in figuring out the state.
  2. Establish a process for team hand off – Once the new team has had a chance to review the project artifacts, it is important to bring all technical resources together. When you work on a long term project and try to document all the nuts and bolts of what you did to implement, sometimes there are intuitive pieces you fail to document. These are components that are so obvious to you that they have become insignificant. However, new resources won’t know and won’t necessarily know to ask, unless they have faced that situation before. In the process of talking through the implementation to educate the new team, these details surface and can be captured.
  3. Communicate! – The need to communicate only becomes larger during times of transition. The project manager needs to be fully engaged with all team members and stakeholders. Being open and honest about the transition state yields a bit of flexibility among the project team and stakeholders. Make sure to leverage this time to ask the basic questions you don’t know the answer to you and level set expectations.

Project transitions are inevitable, but don’t have to be a horrible experience. Having the proper project documentation, a central project document repository, team hand-offs and very open communication will significantly reduce the risk and improve the success.

 

What’s your Super Power?

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Ms. Hucek’s First Grade Superheroes!This morning as I was trying to identify a topic for this week’s blog post, I came across this  post from The.Project.Management.Hub on what superpower you wish you had as a project manager. This reminded me of the icebreaker activity at last night’s STEM for Her Volunteer Appreciation event.

I recently read Strategic Connections and was very interested in the mechanics of how people introduce themselves during networking. While I hadn’t really thought about it beforehand, I was definitely able to relate to the problem of having a conversation shut down once names, titles & companies were exchanged. While I was planning the volunteer appreciation event, I really wanted to make everyone feel welcome and make networking easy. Instead of the attendees getting bogged down in the details of companies and titles, I created an ice breaker focused on each person’s super power. Since these were all women affiliated with advancing the #stemforher mission, I thought there might be some pretty interesting responses. I was not disappointed.

Today, I’m going to share some of these super powers with the hope of inspiring you to think about yours.

Connection

This super power allows you to quickly assess the needs of people and bridge the gap to other people who can help. The connectors among us establish lasting relationships and generously share of their network.

Leap tall buildings in a single bound

This super power allows you to overcome large obstacles and deliver amazing results. This  power allows you see beyond the problem obstructing your path and allows you to create the plan to circumvent it.

Seeing the future

The ability to see the future puts you ahead of the game. You can anticipate the direction and adjust your plan to fulfill your goals.

Shapeshifting/transformation

This super power allows you to be malleable to any situation. This power makes it easy to  adapt to the temperament, setting and character of any situation. It allows you to rise above the fray to be successful and deliver your desired outcome.

Time travel

This super power combines the ability to see the future with anticipating issues before they arise. Time travelers can adjust quickly to prevent small issues from escalating.

I hope you were inspired to think about your super power – that unique thing that you do really well and allows you to excel at whatever you do. I also hope you’ll consider sharing it with me the next time we meet. Instead of saying “Hi, I’m Dagny Evans, Managing Director at Digital Ambit”, let’s initiate our conversation with “Hi, I’m Dagny Evans, I use my time travel super power to successfully deliver complex data projects.” It sounds a lot more interesting!

 

Data Quality: The Heart of Big Data

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After last week’s post on promise and perils of big data, I wanted to pursue the discussion further around data quality. This is usually covered by “veracity and validity” as additional “Vs” of big data. In my experience, these two really go hand-in-hand and speak to the issue at the heart of driving business value leveraging big data. If users are not confident in the data quality, then it doesn’t matter what insights the system delivers as no adoption will occur.

4vs_big_dataMerriam-Webster defines something as valid when it is “well-grounded or justifiable: being at once relevant and meaningful; logically correct.” Veracity is defined as “something true.” In the big data conversation (as found on insideBIGDATA, veracity refers to the biases, noise and abnormalities found in data while validity refers to the accuracy and correctness. At it’s core, the question of data quality comes down to whether they data you have is reliable and trustworthy for making decisions.

In a Jan 2015 article on big data veracity, IBM speculated that uncertain data will account for 80% of your data. The author Jean Francois Puget said that 80% of an analytics project is comprised of data cleansing. I whole-heartedly agree that 80% of data analytics project time should be spent on data cleansing. Unfortunately, in my experience, the project urgency and promise reduce this time significantly.

While the reality might be slightly alarming, I think there are steps in the process that can minimize data quality issues.

  1. Make sure the team understands the business problem – How can you know what data you need, if you don’t understand the business problem? Further, how can you know if your data is accurate or true for solving the business problem? All data analysis and quality checks should become obvious once the project team gets grounded in the business problem.
  2. Map out the data needed to solve the business problem – Once you understand the business problem, you can start to map out the data you need to solve it. You’ll want to consider how the data will be sourced. Data obtained from outside your sphere of influence (department, organization, etc) may require additional manipulation and cleansing to get to a usable state.
  3. Analyze your source data – Even if you are comfortable in the data source, you will still want to do some analysis once you start receiving data. Just because documentation says something is true, does not make it so. Values may be different than expected, which could have significant impact on your model or visualization.
  4. Make decisions about the business rules – It is very rare for data to be usable without any manipulation or cleansing. In response to steps 1-3, decide how the data needs to be manipulated.
    1. How should the specific business rule be applied (i.e. fill in gaps with average of last 10 records)?
    2. When will the business rule run (i.e. at what step of the process)?
    3. Who, specifically which system, is responsible for applying the business rule (i.e. Is it the source system? Is it an intermediary system (like Mulesoft) that feeds the data to you? Is it the data load process? Or is it a post load process?)
  5. Clearly document & get sign off on everything captured above –  Leveraging big data to deliver business value is hard. Documentation acts as a reminder of what was done and why. It should clearly define the problem, the data, the sources, the business rules as well as the confirmation that the project team and audience agreed to the path taken.

During my projects, I spend a lot of time around data analysis. As the project manager I want to fully understand the data, and I want confidence that it is correct and reliable. It’s this same effort that needs to be taken with the project stakeholders and end users to given them a comfort level. Each step of the process of validating assumptions are proof points for building trust. It is trust that will yield adoption.