Celebrate Progress Forward to Win

Sometimes we get so busy planning for the next big thing for our team, we forget to pause to acknowledge and be thankful for the mountain of work we just conquered together.

Over the last couple years, our data team at Compassion International quietly and carefully led the transition from an old, on-premise data warehouse (called Netezza) to Snowflake , a cloud-based warehouse. This was not a one team show. Every area of our ministry had to be engaged to rewrite business, dashboard, and application algorithms to tap the new data locations and take advantage of the new #dataanalytics horse power we were making available. Once we’d perservered to climb that mountain, we took some time to savor the moment and multiply the momentum forward.

How much data was moved, you might ask? Some 83 billion rows of ministry data, that is 2.3 terabytes, are now available and humming in Snowflake to serve well the ministry, children, and churches worldwide!

Moving Our Ministry Forward to Release Children from Poverty in Jesus’ Name

I like the way Whitney Johnson urges business leaders to make time for team celebrations in her HBR article. She contrasts the mindset of some who treat celebrations “as though it is contrary to productivity and efficiency to relish, even briefly, reaching our objectives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Celebration is an important opportunity to cement the lessons learned on the path to achievement, and to strengthen the relationships between people that make future achievement more plausible.”

Our milestone was more than two years in the making as we continue to modernize our key data platforms supporting our data fabric. Compassion’s CIO, Pamela Parisian said, “It’s a shining example of our strategic focus on empowering staff by flowing trusted data to the right neighbour at the right moment!”

The new data warehouse enables scalable computation power and data storage, empowering the ministry to leap to new frontiers of data sharing, data enrichment, and analytics. It's part of the backbone of Compassion’s data ecosystem for knowing, loving, and connecting with our supporters, beneficiaries, national offices, partners, and frontline churches that serve children globally.

Multiple leaders, data professionals, developers, and engineers from across the ministry came together for this important project and celebrated, either in person at our Colorado Springs headquarters or via Zoom.

We struck a celebration coin to commemorate the achievement. I got to present individual challenge coins to several team members who’d led the efforts ( Dana Jeffers, MBA , Bill Border , Andy Sturt , and Yongwon Lee ) and let them feel the appreciation from me and the other teams at the event.

Our Hearts Were Full of Gratitude

The good work in transitioning the data over to Snowflake was a long and, at times, challenging road; the words from Galatians 6:9, referenced on the challenge coin, remain true:

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

As a result of the whole team’s diligence, perseverance, and hard work, all business processes using data from Netezza are now functioning from Snowflake instead. That’s a testament to what we can accomplish, together, as a ministry when we give our plans over to the Lord!

Tony Marciel , Compassion’s Vice President of Business Solutions & Engagement, summed up the event well: “There are key milestones where Global IT has pivoted and benefitted the ministry and accelerated our mission. And this is one of those moments. All of you have left your fingerprint on this moment in Compassion’s technology, history, and trajectory. So kudos to you all!”

It was a moment worth celebrating. I’d encourage you to identify those moments in your own #datascience organization, encourage the distributed teams and the introverts to gather together, break bread, and celebrate to win!

Reference

Johnson, W. (2022, January 26). Celebrate to Win. HBR. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2022/01/celebrate-to-win

Jeff Collins?(PhD, Carnegie Mellon University) writes from the Colorado front range. He is currently working to release children from poverty as the Senior Director of Data & Analytics at?Compassion International. He is a former Air Force commander, Pentagon strategist, Chief Technoloy Innovation Officer, cybersecurity analyst and the founding director of?Air Force CyberWorx, focused on design education, cyber and data science capabilities, and disruptive technologies. You can follow Jeff on?LinkedIn. The views here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Compassion International, the U.S. Govenment, Department of Defense or the United States Air Force.