Seven Steps Every Successful Data Architect Follows to Build Stronger Teams

Does your team understand the connection between your data models and your organization’s priorities? Or is there a barrier to communication between sides? To help you understand and address the situation within your own organization, Karen López describes seven strategies to ensure a collaborative team environment.

When teams work together with a common goal and a passion for success, their projects succeed. When the opposite occurs, everyone loses, including the team, the employer, and their customers.

There is often something wrong with the data models being prepared by the team architects. But often there is a significant disconnect between what the architects are doing and what the rest of the team expects them to do.

Most information technology (IT) professionals have experienced contention and conflict in at least one of their projects, often because of misunderstandings of what data architects deliver. This mismatch of expectations can slow down a project and lead to weak products. Sometimes, organizations can get to where more effort is spent on resolving contentious issues than on getting actual work completed.

Here are some benefits of working as a coherence team:

• Collaborative tasks are completed faster: When teams are working toward the same goal, both individual and collaborative tasks are completed faster. They spend less time and effort revisiting decisions, debating courses of action, and critiquing end results.
• Collaborative tasks are easier: When there is less contention and more trust among team members, tasks are easier to complete because there are fewer distractions. Team members are not escalating decisions for their managers for resolution.
• Collaboration increases confidence in IT teams: When business users see IT professionals debating the merits of some technical decision, they lose confidence in IT as a whole.

When they continue to see the same issue raised throughout a project or carrying over to other projects, they lose confidence in the IT organization, even if only a few causes the issue.

Karen López is the Senior Project Manager and Architect at InfoAdvisors. She has more than twenty years of experience in helping organizations implement large, multi-project programs. She is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, specializing in data modeling and database design.

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