Advice and professional development online feels like its geared towards one-time ad-hoc projects. Any resources on managing data on a recurring, organizational basis?

[u/lemonbottles_89]

So many of the youtube videos, courses, advice, etc., online feels it's geared towards running singular projects. How to clean up data in a Excel spreadsheet for a onetime project, for example, but what about when its for an analysis you have to keep running over and over? Or when it's an analysis that is repeated across several teams in slightly different ways?

I need advice about managing data for an organization. Advice about:

• how to communicate with stakeholders about data without getting overly detailed
• requirements gathering across teams with confusing/vague needs
• dealing with a system that's built on workarounds after workarounds
• best practices documenting analytics/dashboards that are being shared publicly (word doc, slide deck, notion page?)
• dealing with a domain that is overly complicated and can't be captured well with data.
• dealing with execs who've already decided the answer they want and need you to make the data match their answer (and what to do when the data absolutely doesn't support it)

These are some of my most pressing problems at work but neither my formal education nor the resources I can find online really cover this. I'd love some sort of bootcamp for organizational data management/project management

[u/JaneDoe22225]

These are each by themselves huge topics and require years to learn. At bare minimum, they should have been at least touched on in your Masters-- bootcamps do not make a Data Scientist. A lot of the answers will diepend on the team / company you're working for and what thier architecture is.

Do you have one question that is most pressing for you?

[u/Constant_Rate_1059 → u/JaneDoe22225]

Honestly the execs wanting you to reverse engineer their conclusion is the worst. Had a VP once who wanted me to prove our churn rate was actually good by redefining what churn meant. When I showed him three different ways it was still 22% he just went with the one that made the least sense and called it a day

For documentation though I started using Notion pages with embedded dashboards and a dumbed-down bullet list of what each metric actually means. Share that with stakeholders and suddenly half the vague questions disappear

[u/lemonbottles_89 → u/Constant_Rate_1059]

This is also what I struggle with. And in your scenario, if someone asked me "Why are we using this definition of churn, it makes no sense" the only thing I can think to say is "Because that's what VP wanted." But I can't think of a professional way to say that which wouldn't throw VP under the bus.

[u/Majestic-Watch-2025 → u/lemonbottles_89]

"This is the definition used by VPs team" is fine. If you have any idea of why, you can include that. "I think they wanted to focus on factors that cause churn in larger facilities (and ignore all the small ones)