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What skills does a Data Manager need? This question is often asked if you work in a data role and are interested in taking your career to the next level. Firstly, understanding what a data manager does will help you understand the skills required. A data manager needs to have a solid grasp of many different data skills. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert in each one, but you need to know enough to manage teams of various data professions. Understanding what each data profession does and what they need to deliver will ensure you can hit your targets as a data manager.
Table of contents
What a data manager does
A data manager will wear multiple hats, but ultimately, they are responsible for data within an organisation. Data managers typically are the product owners of data platforms such as data warehouses, data lakes and BI reporting & analytics tools. They will be tasked with and held accountable for delivering data initiatives and projects within the organisation. They will be responsible for the quality and integrity of the data made available to the organisation. In addition a data manager will oversee data governance policies and standards the organisation needs to adhere. Data security cannot be overlooked, and in conjunction with IT, a data manager will need to ensure data security policies are in place. As you can see, a data manager’s role is quite involved, and a significant about of responsibility sits on their shoulders.
A data manager manages all the data professions in an organisation—data engineers, data scientists, ETL developers, data warehouse developers, report writers and data analysts. These roles will vary based on the organisation’s size, but typically, team leads will report directly to a data manager in mid to large organisations. For example, a data engineering team lead and a data scientist team lead will report to a data manager with other team leads. In turn, a data manager will report to either a Chief Data Officer (CDO) or a Chief Information Officer (CIO).
What skills does a data manager need
Project delivery
Project delivery is something that you will need to be adept at. Successful projects will help your career and you’re standing in your organisation. You will have project managers across your projects, but you’ll need to keep an eye on how they are managing these projects. Projects, by their nature, hit issues at various stages. A good data manager will be prepared for this, and they will be able to course-correct the project if the situation arises. You need to understand how many concurrent projects you can have running at any time. You will also have the challenge of prioritising business as usual (BAU) activities while at the same time supporting the projects that are running. Good project delivery comes down to overseeing project budgets, helping resolve issues, mitigating project risks and ensuring project timelines are met.
Stakeholder management
Stakeholder management is of critical importance. Your stakeholders will be dependent on the data your team provides to the entire organisation. They will expect exceptionally high data quality standards. Data security will be front and foremost of their minds. They will know the impact security breaches can have on organisations, and they won’t want such incidents impacting the business’s operations. As a data manager, you will have to deal with competing priorities. Balancing project delivery, BAU demands, and overall governance will ensure you deliver for all stakeholders and the organisation.
Leadership and Management skills
Solid leadership and management skills will be required to manage the various teams and data professionals that will make up your team. Internally within your team, you will have both functional and technical groups. Your team will look to you for strategic leadership on new products, new trends and emerging data standards. As is often the case when working with technical teams, there is always a desire to adopt the latest and greatest technology trends. You will have to take a strategic and measured approach, always putting the long-term benefits to the organisation first. Focusing your teams on the understanding that they support the organisations’ ability to do business will be how you will lead. Celebrating successes and rewarding excellence will empower your teams to support your endeavours and deliver for the organisation.
Data governance
As a data manager, you will need to be well versed in data governance. Choosing the proper data governance framework to adopt is essential to support a data-driven culture. Companies put a lot of emphasis on data governance. Data governance can mean different things to different organisations, and specific frameworks or standards will suit some organisations over others. Finding the balance between solid data governance and not introducing bureaucracy or additional overhead will be the data managers responsibility. It is essential to get this balance right to foster data governance adoption and support within an organisation.
Data Quality
As the owner of all data stores and reporting solutions, a data manager must ensure exceptionally high data quality. All end-users and stakeholders who make decisions with the data need to trust the data emphatically. A data manager’s role is to ensure data quality checks are built into all transformations, data pipelines, and logic aggregating and combining data. Data quality must be measured and reported on internally. A data manager can create awareness and trust by publishing data quality metrics internally.
Data Security
Data security is a critical aspect of a data manager’s role. A data manager will be responsible for personally identifying information (PII) and sensitive information related to the organisation’s business. In conjunction with IT and security specialists, a data manager must ensure that the most robust protective measures are appropriate to protect the organisation’s data assets. Together with IT, a data manager will define the data security policies for the organisation. Only authorised users should be granted access to the data. A data manager will need to report internally to senior stakeholders regularly on data security.
Data Professions a data manager will manage
As a data manager, you will have varied data professionals reporting directly or indirectly to you. In most cases, you will have teams of data engineers, BI developers, report writers and Data Scientists. Each profession is briefly explained below to give you an overview of these roles.
Data engineers
A Data engineer’s role is to ingest, process, and make data available for downstream processing. Depending on your organisation’s data platform, your data engineering team will load data from all data sources to a data lake or data warehouse. This new emerging data profession constantly evolves with new tools to streamline and speed up data engineering processes.
Report writes
Report writers or data visualisation experts create reports and visualisations for business users within the organisation. Business departments within the organisation that require reports to be developed will be clients of the data team. Successful report writers take the time to understand their clients reporting requirements fully. Report writers are client-facing and represent the data team within the organisation. A data manager will need to ensure the report writer team represent the data team professionally by delivering to the highest standards possible.
BI developers
Traditionally, business intelligence developers have been the backbone of data and reporting teams with organisations. Someone with good BI skills can perform the tasks of a data engineer or report writer. Having strong BI developers in a data team gives a data manager options if sourcing data engineers or report writer become difficult.
Data Scientists
Data science teams tend to get a lot of focus within organisations. The data science profession is a relatively new data profession, and companies are still working out how to best deploy these skills. Data science projects are often high profile with big expectations. Ensuring your data science team delivers for the organisation is critical for any data manager.
Conclusion
As described above, a data manager’s role covers many different aspects of data within an organisation. It comes with a high level of responsibility and accountability. As a successful data manager, you can significantly impact an organisation.
