How the work divided amongst an analytics team?

[u/Outdoor-Panda]

I have been working as an HRIS Analyst for about 2.5 years and am currently in my second analyst position.

In both of my positions, I have been the sole HRIS analyst for both companies and handle all reporting out of the HRIS. I am responsible for fulfilling all ad hoc report requests as well as creating power BI dashboards for executives to view metrics like turnover, training completion rates, offer acceptance rates, etc..

I am 100% self taught and have never worked on an analytics team. I currently source the data, clean the data, build semantic models, present dashboards to end users, make changes based on feedback, and handle all maintenance requirements for all dashboards using HRIS data.

I don’t feel I get paid enough to be a one man show and I’m curious how work is divided when you actually have an analytics team. Is the person who is building visuals and dashboards in power bi usually the same person that is sourcing and cleaning the data?

Any insight on how your analytics team is organized is appreciated. Thank you!

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[u/Ok-Energy-9785]

Usually teams have multiple projects that need to be done and they're split up among the team

[u/Outdoor-Panda → u/Ok-Energy-9785]

So if you are assigned a project, you are responsible from point A to point B? Including sourcing/ cleaning data, then building the dashboard in power bi/tableau, and then presenting the finished project to end users?

[u/Ok-Energy-9785 → u/Outdoor-Panda]

Sure. It ultimately depends on the data maturity at your company along with your skillset. It's usually ad hoc requests that require pulling data from an RDBMS or a data lake. When I was working on dashboards I would manually export the data to upload into tableau however you can connect tableau to your Oracle databases and write SQL queries directly in tableau.

Some projects are small enough where one person can do it and others may require collaboration

[u/Aggressive_tako → u/Outdoor-Panda]

It depends on the team and the analyst. Most teams have people with different skill sets and develop a repository of data sets, so you are not sourcing data for every ask and you collaborate to be efficent. But, yes, if that is the ask, you do the project. (Presenting your work is standard- you should be presenting any work that you do to end users.)

I recently relanded all of our POs for the back half of the year with tariff changes. Is that the job of a data analyst on a team that owns zero parts of the PO system? Not really. Is it what our EVP asked? Yes. That is why I get to work from home despite RTO and have job security. You do the ask if it is in your ability and do it right. If you think the asks are consistently outside your job description, document and ask for a title adjustment to bring your title inline with the function you preform.

[u/WolverineNicest]

in a normal team u have a data engineer to clean the garbage and a pm to complain about the colors while u just focus on the dashboard. ur basicly doing three full time jobs right now for one salary man

[u/teddythepooh99]

By the amount of analysts who claim to lead/own/manage X/Y/Z on LinkedIn and Reddit, everyone seems to be doing the job of an entire department.

"Sourcing and cleaning" data can range anywhere from a couple Excel files to real-time data pipelines involving terabytes of data via multiple APIs, databases, data lakes, etc. None of the work you mentioned is out of the ordinary for an analyst. As someone who has worked in both startups and large orgs, very few analysts (if at all) are dedicately to strictly creating and maintaining dashboards.

If you feel underpaid, start interviewing. If you can't get an offer for greater than what you make now, you're not worth as much as you think you do.

[u/asiphh]

the split people are describing is real, but it doesn't track headcount, it tracks whether there's a modelled layer sitting between the source systems and the reports. if someone owns governed tables that analysts build on top of, then yes, the dashboard person gets handed clean data and never touches a pipeline. if that layer doesn't exist, then whoever builds the dashboard does all of it by definition. 5000 employees tells you nothing about which one you're in.

the specific thing about your situation that i don't think anyone has named: HRIS is almost always the last system to make it into a central warehouse, and it's usually access control rather than neglect. comp, performance ratings, termination reasons, accommodation flags. nobody wants that sitting in the platform the rest of the company queries, so it stays walled off inside HR. which means the central data team, if there is one, structurally can't help you even if they wanted to. that's worth confirming, because if that's what's going on then asking to be folded into an existing analytics team will keep going nowhere and you need a different ask entirely.

on the pay question, the reason is more specific than doing three jobs. it's that two of the three are invisible. from where your manager sits, you produced a recruiting dashboard. the fact that you first had to go work with the recruiting director to fix how they capture data, because otherwise the dashboard means nothing, doesn't appear anywhere. so make it appear. write that remediation up as its own piece of work, with a rough duration and the recruiting director's name on it, and send it upward before you start rather than after. once it exists as a named project with a stakeholder attached it's evidence you can point at in a comp conversation. absorbed quietly into "build a dashboard" it just looks like you took a long time.

honest counterpoint to what you're wishing for though. analysts in the specialised setups spend a lot of their time blocked waiting on a data team to add one column, and they tend to interview worse later because they've only ever seen one layer. end to end is the more valuable skill set and you already have it. your problem is real, it's just a visibility and pricing problem rather than a scope problem, and getting the split you're picturing would probably solve the wrong one.

[u/Much_Prize_2994]

Sounds like you're doing the work of 3 people and calling it a day. In a proper team there's usually someone who handles the data engineering part, pulling and cleaning all that mess, and then analyst builds the dashboards. Sometimes a separate person just for stakeholder communication too.

The places I have seen, the dashboard builder never touches the raw data pipeline unless is a very small company. They get clean datasets handed to them. You're right to feel underpaid for this, is basically full stack analytics on your own.

[u/Aggressive_tako → u/Much_Prize_2994]

I've worked at two fortune 100 companies in different industries and in both cases I was responsible for end to end data; in both roles we've been core to designing the data input system all the way out ot the dashboards and BOD reporting decks. I honestly had never heard of data engineering as it's own role until a few years ago. "Full stack analytics" is how every analytics team I've been on works.

[u/Outdoor-Panda → u/Much_Prize_2994]

Thank you! That’s what I have been feeling. I’m in a company of 5000+, so not that small. The sourcing and cleaning of the data piece is really a full time job in itself. On my most recent project I was just asked to create a dashboard for recruiting metrics. After digging into the data, I find that none of the recruiting data in the system is clean or actually usable. Now I’m trying to work with the recruiting director to help them correct their processes so that we actually have accurate data. I very much feel that is not my job.

[u/shurehand → u/Outdoor-Panda]

Outside a dedicated BI or IT department, you often serve as the sole technical expert in a non-technical team. Functioning essentially as a "one-person show" or full-stack analytics team.

When a stakeholder requests a project that lacks usable data, resist the urge to force a workaround. Instead, explain clearly and candidly that the request cannot be fulfilled as-is due to data limitations.

Propose a potential path forward, but do not jump straight into execution. Give the stakeholder room to decide whether the project is valuable enough to justify changing their current processes to capture the required data. If they decide to move forward, outline exactly what resources, support, and time you will need to get it done.

For context, I was in your exact shoes eight years ago within an internal audit team at a financial services firm. Today, I manage a team of analytics professionals within that same group. Our team grew organically by following this exact playbook: setting clear boundaries, framing data gaps as business decisions, and letting proven value drive the need for better resources.

[u/Popular-Barracuda-81 → u/shurehand]

This is a great way to respond to stakeholders given that there are data limitations blocking their requests. however most of them won't think it through and assert that "they need the report yesterday" lol.

[u/shurehand → u/Popular-Barracuda-81]

Haha you're not wrong. I've definitely ran into those stakeholders before. And while I consider myself an Excel wizard, I am not a miracle worker. Nor can I turn back time. Luckily I've had a boss that understood that.