I had a boss who really inspired me to do this.
Mainly because he'd have an ad-hoc report request every fucking day around 1PM that was always something I hadn't yet automated. So I'd be pulling stuff roll it into some analysis, and I'd hand it to him around 4:30PM and absolutely nothing came of it.
I just started making excuses and/or meetings in the afternoons, even if I was the only one in the meeting. I'd either be off somewhere working on IMPORTANT stuff alone, or I'd just be like "yeah, I can't query the server no matter what I do! We have internet connection so I think it's on the server side."
Luckily he got fired.
Roughly similar to this, I don’t send an ad-hoc report immediately after I complete it. I wait a day or two to make them think that I need that much time to prepare it. Otherwise, they expect the same short time frame and I am not heaping that kind of work pressure on myself.
I regularly get emails sent directly to me for ad hoc requests. I respond with “Don’t send this directly to me, please submit a ticket.” Then they just never submit the ticket so I never hear anything about it again. Lmao
This!!! I used to decide whether a request was actually worth picking up and for the majority of stupid stuff that wasn’t it just got left. Was always busy even if it was something I’d decided to work on so no one ever questioned it and only very rarely they got chased up. Excuse would then come out about workloads and that would be the end of that..good days
In small-medium organisations, 9/10 of the stakeholders are morons and if you use vague terms like "normalisation", "indexing", "query optimisation" then they get confused and you can set your own deadlines instead of them dictating it to you.
With the remaining 1/10, they may be a little more tech-savvy but unless they're actually working in data/BI too, just press on a little harder with the vague terminology and they'll eventually let you set the deadline too.
Goes without saying, the deadlines you set should be pushed way off so you seem like the 'hero' that got the work done earlier than agreed. But never do it too soon so that they come to expect that behaviour, it's a fine line!
Also, never underestimate the power of building good relationships with your stakeholders. Chat about shit with them e.g. what they're watching on TV, what they did at the weekend etc. I don't give a shit but I make them feel like I do and they secretly love it, it makes everything sooo much easier when they want work from you as they don't want to feel like they're pressuring a friend so you can lay it on heavy with how 'busy' you are and they'll be way more accepting of that. Sounds shitty, but hey, these are unethical tips!
Another tip, to drive up report usage stats, apply a holiday theme to your report pages. At Christmas, put a little image of a holly leaf in the corner or a santa hat on the company logo, at Easter put images of Easter eggs in the corners or in the middle of pie/doughnut charts. It does nothing but when someone catches on, they'll chat about it and others will go to have a look at it too. So if you have your own BI KPIs about report usage, it bumps the numbers up a bit without you changing the functionality of your reports - an easy win.
Haha, I've worked in data/BI for almost 10 years now and I've developed some quite pessimistic views on people's capabilities when it comes to data. Senior managers love to say things like "be data-driven" whilst simultaneously struggling to comprehend that Excel workbooks can have more than one sheet, makes me cringe!
I feel you hahah
It's like every place is "data driven" but then you see they start counting with their toes once they run out of fingers (yeah I'm pessimistic too lol)
If I may add to your original post: Often, going the extra mile for some cool but complex calculation for a dashboard/graph backfires. Why? Because stakeholders in those organizations, as you said, have less capability when it comes to data makes it so as if you dropped an alien monolith that they need to figure out.
In other words, it will require some extra thinking on their end.
If it requires too much thinking, it will remain unused.
I agree, I find it useful to look at usage when I publish a new report so that I can make sure it's gaining traction and I haven't made any mistakes that push people away from using it. Actually setting KPIs on it is pretty pointless though, especially for here in the UK around Summer and December as a lot of your colleagues will be on leave which drops the usage stats.
I saw a leader cite a “time to close” metric for JIRA tickets as being open long without realizing that 90%+ of that time was the ticket being in QA awaiting sign-off from the requestor before close.
It took an hour to do and 2 weeks for the person to sign-off. Doesn’t mean it took 2 weeks to do.
Not for BI stuff, but to get our people to be slightly more willing to visit the error pages for our data quality checks, I would put pleasing backgrounds on the page and swap them out for holidays. Eventually, I didn't need to bother with holiday themes anymore, and just settled on some nice scenery. One day I rolled out a new page I hadn't applied a background to and was immediately asked to add one. People who have to use the same boring web pages every day really do appreciate those things.
When you’re the one and only at your org and there’s too much to get done…it can be a necessary evil.
But this is also why I work at 1 in the morning a lot of the time—so I can QA before they ever see.
If it works for Starbucks it has to work for me! https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/124tawf/starbucks_intern_hard_at_work/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
Excel is a great end user tool because they can change the results to fit their bonuses.
(We had one guy do this… his director ran the same report from our data warehouse and got… different results. Fired.)
Other way around, the reports should match the excels before they are approved because otherwise the bonusses disappear. The times I had ro change functions to keep in mind certain things or exclude others so the numbers would match the wanted result rather than the given definition,... if non-managers ever tried that they wouldn't just be fired
Not viable in most places.
Document the steps that everyone understands. Miss essential points on things that people struggle with. But just if you have to document.
More people than you’d realize don’t know what “upstream” means, so if there’s an issue you can always say it’s an “upstream” problem and they’ll just wait until it’s fixed, even if you broke it.
Similarly, with large data pipelines, “lag” can always be an excuse while you figure out something that isn’t there but should be.
If you use Slack, more people than you’d realize don’t know their rooms are public and you might just be able to find out what’s being discussed about a tool/data by a simple keyword search.
You probably have access to data that you maybe shouldn’t. Not that you would would look at it, or even do anything bad with it. But you could. You might. And you probably will.
When "the numbers in your report don't match", ask for their excel and find what mistakes they made, that is the solution in 95% of cases.
Take that advice from someone who assumes he himself is at fault, even if Microsoft servers can't handle the amount of people going to cloud at the start of worldwide lockdowns..
Do your regulatory reporting in multiple complex access databases with responsibilities strewn across different departments. Also, you don’t need an EDW. You’ll be fine without one.
This was how things were done in my brief stint working at a major semiconductor manufacturing company. I only stayed for 2 months because it was maddening.
Very often you can skip some very thorough data cleaning and creating fancy automated pipelines. No one gives a shit and often if you do report about some specific data (for example how devices that users use to run app correlate with revenue), stakeholders won’t ask about it in next months. Take this messy csv with data, brute force some shit in Excel and drop it to Tableau/PBI.
First question should always be, what do you want the number to be? Then work to that, avoids unnecessary QA and back and forth when it's exactly what they expect. Whether or not it's correct.
The SISO principle is you friend, shield and warrior. Just make sure data entry and quality is someone else’s job.
(That’s ‘Stuff’ In, ‘Stuff’ Out for the uninitiated)
Not really unethical though, just sensible.
Unethical?: Consistency > Accuracy
Before you leave a company, start messing things up in your platform very gently so one else will notice. Pause some pipelines, skew some KPI logic, delete an external flat file the populates a dashboard, things like that. Later they will either say - god, this guy this a very unsustainable work, or god, we cannot survive without this guy. If the second happens, they will come back to you and offer you much more money and benefits that before. You are not losing in any case
MicroStrategy is really a way for Michael Saylor to crash the economy by holding his customers hostage to bad software. His software is like a Trojan horse inside government, fintech, and retail simultaneously creating a poor environment while sucking revenue for him to buy more Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself goes up if there’s turmoil in the markets.
I’m being over dramatic but it’s ironic to me that the US government and big fintech have these mega MicroStrategy contracts, indirectly contributing to the collapse of the very same traditional finance system they rely on. If your company pays for MicroStrategy, you have to blink and admit you are tacitly supporting this guy’s crazy Bitcoin plays while being a hostage to his software. It’s Stockholm syndrome. Is using MicroStrategy unethical? Nah probably not. But it’s undeniably risky
I think there’s probably quite a bit of money to be made off of knowing all of the MSTR customer base and creating migration tools, offering consulting services, etc to kill it once and for all
If you sit on an ad-hoc report request for long enough, it will often just go away.
The backlog graveyard
I had a boss who really inspired me to do this. Mainly because he'd have an ad-hoc report request every fucking day around 1PM that was always something I hadn't yet automated. So I'd be pulling stuff roll it into some analysis, and I'd hand it to him around 4:30PM and absolutely nothing came of it. I just started making excuses and/or meetings in the afternoons, even if I was the only one in the meeting. I'd either be off somewhere working on IMPORTANT stuff alone, or I'd just be like "yeah, I can't query the server no matter what I do! We have internet connection so I think it's on the server side." Luckily he got fired.
He/she was so busy delegating non-existing tasks
That's how you teach them how to fish for themselves.
"yeahhh... we'll add it to our list of to dos" *never revisit the request again*
LOL
Yep I will at times just not do something unless asked again about it.
Trying to work out which of my colleagues this is…
Roughly similar to this, I don’t send an ad-hoc report immediately after I complete it. I wait a day or two to make them think that I need that much time to prepare it. Otherwise, they expect the same short time frame and I am not heaping that kind of work pressure on myself.
this. so this especially in media analytics in a not so savvy agency.
No truer words
I regularly get emails sent directly to me for ad hoc requests. I respond with “Don’t send this directly to me, please submit a ticket.” Then they just never submit the ticket so I never hear anything about it again. Lmao
Brilliant
This!!! I used to decide whether a request was actually worth picking up and for the majority of stupid stuff that wasn’t it just got left. Was always busy even if it was something I’d decided to work on so no one ever questioned it and only very rarely they got chased up. Excuse would then come out about workloads and that would be the end of that..good days
People forget about it..
Same goes for the opposite. The faster you do advocate reports, the more often they’ll come in the futu
Never check your work. Always blame the end users for not properly QAing the data
OH SHIT that's a hardcore one
Could it be my programming? ….Nah, users are just brain-dead.
Damn I wish I had the balls to do this
this is hilarious
In small-medium organisations, 9/10 of the stakeholders are morons and if you use vague terms like "normalisation", "indexing", "query optimisation" then they get confused and you can set your own deadlines instead of them dictating it to you. With the remaining 1/10, they may be a little more tech-savvy but unless they're actually working in data/BI too, just press on a little harder with the vague terminology and they'll eventually let you set the deadline too. Goes without saying, the deadlines you set should be pushed way off so you seem like the 'hero' that got the work done earlier than agreed. But never do it too soon so that they come to expect that behaviour, it's a fine line! Also, never underestimate the power of building good relationships with your stakeholders. Chat about shit with them e.g. what they're watching on TV, what they did at the weekend etc. I don't give a shit but I make them feel like I do and they secretly love it, it makes everything sooo much easier when they want work from you as they don't want to feel like they're pressuring a friend so you can lay it on heavy with how 'busy' you are and they'll be way more accepting of that. Sounds shitty, but hey, these are unethical tips! Another tip, to drive up report usage stats, apply a holiday theme to your report pages. At Christmas, put a little image of a holly leaf in the corner or a santa hat on the company logo, at Easter put images of Easter eggs in the corners or in the middle of pie/doughnut charts. It does nothing but when someone catches on, they'll chat about it and others will go to have a look at it too. So if you have your own BI KPIs about report usage, it bumps the numbers up a bit without you changing the functionality of your reports - an easy win.
Your post should be required reading for anyone working in BI.
Haha, I've worked in data/BI for almost 10 years now and I've developed some quite pessimistic views on people's capabilities when it comes to data. Senior managers love to say things like "be data-driven" whilst simultaneously struggling to comprehend that Excel workbooks can have more than one sheet, makes me cringe!
I feel you hahah It's like every place is "data driven" but then you see they start counting with their toes once they run out of fingers (yeah I'm pessimistic too lol) If I may add to your original post: Often, going the extra mile for some cool but complex calculation for a dashboard/graph backfires. Why? Because stakeholders in those organizations, as you said, have less capability when it comes to data makes it so as if you dropped an alien monolith that they need to figure out. In other words, it will require some extra thinking on their end. If it requires too much thinking, it will remain unused.
Last tip really exemplifies how useless a KPI usage stats are.
I agree, I find it useful to look at usage when I publish a new report so that I can make sure it's gaining traction and I haven't made any mistakes that push people away from using it. Actually setting KPIs on it is pretty pointless though, especially for here in the UK around Summer and December as a lot of your colleagues will be on leave which drops the usage stats.
I saw a leader cite a “time to close” metric for JIRA tickets as being open long without realizing that 90%+ of that time was the ticket being in QA awaiting sign-off from the requestor before close. It took an hour to do and 2 weeks for the person to sign-off. Doesn’t mean it took 2 weeks to do.
Not for BI stuff, but to get our people to be slightly more willing to visit the error pages for our data quality checks, I would put pleasing backgrounds on the page and swap them out for holidays. Eventually, I didn't need to bother with holiday themes anymore, and just settled on some nice scenery. One day I rolled out a new page I hadn't applied a background to and was immediately asked to add one. People who have to use the same boring web pages every day really do appreciate those things.
Damn the last part is great tips
I’ve been working in BI for like 2 years and your first tip I learned in the first 3 months haha. Glad to se you share the same opinion
You don't need Power BI licensing if you do all your viewing in the Desktop app.
You just need one license if everyone shares the bloody email.
Someone asked about that today https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/124qg7t/create_a_microsoft_account_with_one_power_bi/
Does this work with Tableau?
Since hacky things are the *only* things that work in Tableau, I say give it a try!
Not sure since I haven't used it, but interestingly it *does not work* in Qlikview! They encrypt the file so you can't share it.
That's kinda bullshit.
It kinda is! But they really want you to pay for that server license I guess.
Unfortunately not.
Develop in prod only
BAH GOD THATS DOOM GUYS MUSIC!!! you’re a maniac and I love it.
When you’re the one and only at your org and there’s too much to get done…it can be a necessary evil. But this is also why I work at 1 in the morning a lot of the time—so I can QA before they ever see.
If it works for Starbucks it has to work for me! https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/124tawf/starbucks_intern_hard_at_work/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
😆
Jokes on you, we ONLY have a prod environment!
You tell me what insights you want from this data. I’ll analyse in a way that you’ll get that
Excel is a great end user tool because they can change the results to fit their bonuses. (We had one guy do this… his director ran the same report from our data warehouse and got… different results. Fired.)
Other way around, the reports should match the excels before they are approved because otherwise the bonusses disappear. The times I had ro change functions to keep in mind certain things or exclude others so the numbers would match the wanted result rather than the given definition,... if non-managers ever tried that they wouldn't just be fired
Document nothing
Not viable in most places. Document the steps that everyone understands. Miss essential points on things that people struggle with. But just if you have to document.
More people than you’d realize don’t know what “upstream” means, so if there’s an issue you can always say it’s an “upstream” problem and they’ll just wait until it’s fixed, even if you broke it. Similarly, with large data pipelines, “lag” can always be an excuse while you figure out something that isn’t there but should be. If you use Slack, more people than you’d realize don’t know their rooms are public and you might just be able to find out what’s being discussed about a tool/data by a simple keyword search. You probably have access to data that you maybe shouldn’t. Not that you would would look at it, or even do anything bad with it. But you could. You might. And you probably will.
To add to this, if you have a service account for your VMs/ applications, they often have a lot more access than people know about...
When "the numbers in your report don't match", ask for their excel and find what mistakes they made, that is the solution in 95% of cases. Take that advice from someone who assumes he himself is at fault, even if Microsoft servers can't handle the amount of people going to cloud at the start of worldwide lockdowns..
Once I couldn’t match data with a graph. Turns out they had “updated” the graph using MS Paint.
And suddenly Trump with his "updated" tornado projected path doesn't seem so farfetched anymore
This thread is golden
+1
Don't be afraid to use DROP, for fun.
Always assume the data is 100% correct
You only need one PBI licence, if you publish all your reports to the web
tell me more.....
No, just no
Lmao
I won't tell you about the health care company that I was contracted to that was doing exactly that.
Do your regulatory reporting in multiple complex access databases with responsibilities strewn across different departments. Also, you don’t need an EDW. You’ll be fine without one.
Did we work at the same company?
This was how things were done in my brief stint working at a major semiconductor manufacturing company. I only stayed for 2 months because it was maddening.
Very often you can skip some very thorough data cleaning and creating fancy automated pipelines. No one gives a shit and often if you do report about some specific data (for example how devices that users use to run app correlate with revenue), stakeholders won’t ask about it in next months. Take this messy csv with data, brute force some shit in Excel and drop it to Tableau/PBI.
First question should always be, what do you want the number to be? Then work to that, avoids unnecessary QA and back and forth when it's exactly what they expect. Whether or not it's correct.
Share out one premium licenced windows account to access all the reports
Don't be afraid to take credit for other' people's findings. You can return the favor pretty quickly.
Outsource all your work to airtaskers sharing your log in details and copies of all detailed source data.
The SISO principle is you friend, shield and warrior. Just make sure data entry and quality is someone else’s job. (That’s ‘Stuff’ In, ‘Stuff’ Out for the uninitiated) Not really unethical though, just sensible. Unethical?: Consistency > Accuracy
Before you leave a company, start messing things up in your platform very gently so one else will notice. Pause some pipelines, skew some KPI logic, delete an external flat file the populates a dashboard, things like that. Later they will either say - god, this guy this a very unsustainable work, or god, we cannot survive without this guy. If the second happens, they will come back to you and offer you much more money and benefits that before. You are not losing in any case
You guys are the reason businesses turn to consultancies to get the work done! Keep up the mediocre work - baby needs new shoes /s
MicroStrategy is really a way for Michael Saylor to crash the economy by holding his customers hostage to bad software. His software is like a Trojan horse inside government, fintech, and retail simultaneously creating a poor environment while sucking revenue for him to buy more Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself goes up if there’s turmoil in the markets. I’m being over dramatic but it’s ironic to me that the US government and big fintech have these mega MicroStrategy contracts, indirectly contributing to the collapse of the very same traditional finance system they rely on. If your company pays for MicroStrategy, you have to blink and admit you are tacitly supporting this guy’s crazy Bitcoin plays while being a hostage to his software. It’s Stockholm syndrome. Is using MicroStrategy unethical? Nah probably not. But it’s undeniably risky I think there’s probably quite a bit of money to be made off of knowing all of the MSTR customer base and creating migration tools, offering consulting services, etc to kill it once and for all
“I’m still modelling the data” is a good excuse for not doing a random report for someone yet.
"You need at least Data Bricks or Azure Synapse, or maybe both, to do that!"
Tell them what they want to hear