Data Engineering Kickstart

"We help people who are frustrated by their data. Every business develops essential reports using mysteriously complex spreadsheets that, in-effect, run their operations – and these get harder to maintain every month. If you know that you’re spending too much time wrangling Excel, and not enough time doing your job, read on.

We take a pragmatic, hands-on approach to help companies improve their data management. We’ll spend time with you to understand your business and the nature and impact of your data challenges. We’ll pick a few specific areas where better data would make your life much easier, and work with you to design a solution that is appropriate to your company. And then we’ll build it.

At the end of our Data Engineering Kickstart, we’ll deliver an end-to-end slice of great data tooling, integrated with analytical dashboards and Excel. And you can take what we’ve built, extend it, and use it as the basis for wider organisational change.

We know that great data management must be tailored to the problem and the business. We’ll start with an intensive week of discovery activities to really understand your business.

• What’s the most pressing data challenge that you want to solve? Why is it frustrating, and what would solving it allow you to do? For us, success means making a real difference to your quality of life, and we start by defining what will be different afterwards and how you want to use your data.
• What’s the business context? What does the data mean to the business? We’ll talk to your experts and make sure we really understand the situation before we start to design solutions.
• What data do you currently have, and where does it come from? How is it currently processed, and what are the weak links which cause problems and introduce risk?
• What constraints do a sustainable solution need to respect? We’ll talk to your IT teams to understand your current systems landscape and we’ll design something that’s a perfect fit for your organisation. We’ll plan the delivery of real datasets and dashboards that you can use, typically integrating tools like PowerBI or Tableau to give you interactive visualisations, and the scope to expose your datasets in Excel for detailed analytics.

We’ll spend around a month building the solution we’ve defined together and deliver something fully functional, which straight away will save you time, money, and stress.

We approach our deliveries pragmatically, and we know that what we build has to be usable, maintainable, and extensible for the future. We’ll choose technologies and approaches which are appropriate for your team and your company, and re-use existing tooling where it’s available elsewhere in your organisation.

Over the course of the delivery, we’ll give you regular previews of what we’re building, and revise our dashboards and datasets based on your feedback. And we’ll involve your team members as much as we can, and make sure that you understand what’s been built so that you can build on our foundations in the future.

Our Data Engineering Kickstart is designed to give you practical ideas and working examples of what great data management can be. As we deliver this first engagement, we’ll help you to shape ideas of what a future roadmap might look like, informed by our hands-on experience of your organisation.

At the end of the engagement, we’ll deliver a short report which outlines:

• A summary of the dataflows we’ve produced, the technologies used, and how it all fits together
• Risks and opportunities we’ve identified as we’ve learned more about your data landscape
• Recommendations for the future, and how you can take what we’ve done and extend it through to other data sources and outputs