Ought to I give up if VP of IT is towards me?
Apparently, there is no such thing as a settlement between operations and IT whether or not it must be allowed to do in-depth uncooked information evaluation exterior of IT. VP of IT has actually stated that my place within the operations division shouldn’t exist.
My supervisor has already escalated the difficulty with the next outcome: with a purpose to get a dataset I can analyse, I would like to jot down an in depth request to IT and they’re going to ship it. The identical holds for publishing Energy BI studies. Sadly, he appears to be OK with this outcome.
I (3 yrs of whole expertise, intermediate Python and SQL expertise) was employed 3 months in the past to discover and analyse uncooked information, uncover correlations and visualise outcomes.
Would you keep and attempt to push to boundaries by demonstrating how data-based insights may benefit the organisation or would you permit to keep away from losing your time?
Comments ( 24 )
So let’s state the obvious clearly:
You and your position will be somewhat of a political hit topic between depts and it is clear your organization isn’t very experienced or professional in regards to data.
Does this mean you need to quit? Not necessarily, if you enjoy the rest of the work, if the team is nice, if the pay is good, etc.
But you should know this isn’t a long-term thing because it is unlikely you will be able to make a real career in your team (because they lack the data infrastructure) or the IT team (because they hate you for encroaching on their turf).
So in either case look around.
Lastly, I assume this situation cannot be changed. Because it mostly can’t but that’s without knowing you, your situation and your company.
If you can prove that anything you do will: save money, save time, remove problem, clarify stuff, then I think you should. Leaders are always evaluating whether or not something brings value.
If you can give an example of how to improve anything in the company, do it.
I would personally look for another job where you can grow your skillset without this IT guy in the way.
IT is always making things easy for people
If you stay (others have pointed out this isn’t an insta-quit situation) then I would try to make the IT bottleneck a clear part of every SLA. Over time it may either set up an environment that makes the block a natural part of your work or it may inspire higher ups to expand your autonomy.
EDIT: My poor spelling
Literally exact same thing happened to me. Move to IT. I did. Much happier.
Get him on board with you. Find out if you can solve problems for him. Get chummy. Work is more about social iq then your bullshit programming skills, not to be rude
Ok, what you described isn’t a super horrible situation. But you should always quit if you get a higher paying and better job.
I would give it a good college try, but at the same time he looking for other opportunities.
Make the detailed requests, and be ready to fight those battles when they come back with no data or block you outright.
This is a political game of the company more than anything. It’s not you.
Your job is going to be very difficult and bureaucratic until you secure the rights to access data yourself.
IT VP *might* have some legitimate concerns surrounding data security, privileged access, governance, and possible impact to production systems. They also just might be defensive about budget, headcount, and (selfish) oversight. Welcome to office politics!
Your immediate agro powerplay is to get ahead of any legitimate concerns IT might have, before they even bring them up. Propose a solution in front of leadership, so well thought out, that IT can’t counter with anything remotely legitimate.
Long term, you’re going to want to flip this VP’s attitude from adversarial to business partner. I wouldn’t be surprised if this dynamic was already baked into company culture, Operations vs IT is a classic (wasteful) battle.
Your role is only going to be as impactful as your buy in; if your not having a distinct impact on the business, I’d form an exit plan.
Start applying elsewhere. This is not a place you want to work at.
Well, I would say dont quit, but be continuously looking for other opportunities. Because this is only the first fight of many. What about if you want to request an additional tool/software to do data analysis or the company goes through budget constraints? Any upskill training or networking conferences gonna be an automatic no if it has to go through him. You already know that the VP is gonna put your job on the block to be cut first. Stay but keeping job searching like you unemployed.
I’m in the exact same situation as you right now my friend. I think reading your post the answers just made me realize some things…
You have a 💩 manager. The manager basically negotiated nothing and just formalized IT as a bottleneck without having any incentive to help you. IT has the ability to redirect any of your successes into their domain and you will be left with only working on things that wont land because the landable stuff will become ITs domain
To the experienced people here – would it be wise just to take data already in possession, show some potential to upper management in some demo, technical exchange or town hall meeting? Or let some student write his thesis about that?
Would that action directly flip a switch in managers heads and they let you work on that topic?
Oh youre in operations, so you should really only have access data which is more or less highly aggregated data to work with.
Business roles in operations are typically not allowed to touch raw data, although some companies use a model with an embedded analyst/scientist which serves as the data expert and is given tbat sort of access, however this organizational structure isnt super common in older companies
>VP of IT has literally said that my position in the operations department should not exist.
Everything else doesn’t worry me *that* much, but this statement does.
What was the context? What should happen instead? Does he have people in his organization already doing this type of analysis?
Here’s what I would do: I would ask your boss if it would be possible to have you reporting to IT with a dotted line relationship to him in order to circumvent all this drama.
Wait, so you’re in IT team and analysing Operations data? Why? Don’t you guys have an Operations CoE team working under direct supervision of Head of Operations? Can you explain the political landscape here?
>Would you stay and try to push to boundaries
That’s one thing I wouldn’t do. If what you’re doing is actually useful, things have a way of resolving themselves. Just play along and send them written requests. If someone higher up actually cares about seeing the results of your analysis, they’ll also see that IT is the bottleneck.
I wouldn’t quit, but I would actively be looking for a new position. This is no fault of your own but you have been hired into a difficult position. Do good work while you are there, build a portfolio and resume, and be on the look out for opportunities to move on to another company.
If you care enough, and I don’t want to understate that because change is not going to happen quickly, create a business case and get buy in from the head of ops…they will need to push this through. Clearly and simply explain what you need and quantify (in moneys) the ROI or cost savings that will come directly (preferably) or indirectly from the change in process (your proposal). If you don’t want to do that, and can’t stand the current process, you should probably look for another job.
Been there done that, I have this issue every 3 months, I just started being friendly with IT clerks, and they help me with my queries
There’s some sort of bad blood between this IT leader and ops. It could be any number of things but it’s likely related to some form of SLA or regulatory compliance requirement. Do you have any sense of the data structure or how queries can impact performance on prod or IT processes? Is there a resourcing problem such that making an Ops view of select tables/DBs isn’t feasible? Where’s the tech debt?
Also, I understand why you’re not more specific on the matter but your third paragraph doesn’t sound like a job, it sounds like a scavenger hunt. Are there actual correlations to be discovered? Are you actually developing and testing hypotheses? Do you understand your role within the organization? I’m truly not being critical but it sounds like you haven’t received answers to these questions from your org and that’s kind of a red flag.
I’d just play nice and suck it up, I’m sure the VP will come around if you’re making a financial impact. Money talks ultimately!