As we approach the one year anniversary on my current digitization project at work, I look back to see what can be learned from the experience. Project SWIFT was aimed at providing information about our global manufacturing plants to the product developers earlier in the development process. The output would be a data collection tool and a business intelligence report in Tableau. The objective was quite simple, but we encountered constant obstacles at the micro and macro level.

At the macro level, there were huge shifts occurring in the organization. Our department was undergoing a strategic shift to the cloud and becoming more data driven. This included significant organizational restructures. One of which was a new data analytics team that was positioned closer to the business. This new team absorbed my position. For new business intelligence projects, such as SWIFT, my team took the lead on the technical side. Previously, the business side would drive all requirements while IT would handle the technical side or any communication with a 3rd party for development. There was a new dynamic at play with uncertainties abound as to who takes the lead on ambiguous requirements and design decisions on project SWIFT. I believe this macro level change was the foundation for the many challenges on this project.

At the micro level, I was at the center of all discussions centered around gathering the business requirements. Most of the data required for the final report did not exist, so the early conversations were about what data needed to be captured and the relationship between each item. The initial request translated into 35 different data fields. Immediately, I was pushing back to reduce this large undertaking for a number of reasons. Besides the huge time commitment this would take, we were employing an agile methodology to get this project live as swiftly as possible. As soon as we agreed on a subset of data fields and made progress on their relationships, we hit a major obstacle.

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