What do you do when your Data Warehouse Manager leaves your organization? This may be anyone from your internal analyst to your marketing manager. One day, suddenly, the person that everyone relies on for reporting and analytics is suddenly gone, and you’re left scratching your head. Don’t let this happen to you or your team! In this post, I’ll outline a game plan for dealing with this situation, as well as share some simple recommendations that will help you avoid this in the future!

First of all, if you’re already in this situation, then you know it’s not a good place to be! During my time as an account manager at RJMetrics, I’ve recognized this as a common issue for our clients to overcome. Too often, clients rely on one “main user” to be the sole owner of their data, which can cause a big headache when that person leaves the team. If you are the recipient of an email summary, or if you usually consume finished reports as opposed to creating them yourself, then you’ll want to pay attention. If no one is updating these reports any longer, you run the risk of relying on stale or incorrect data. You’ll need to step up and take ownership so that you and your team don’t end up making decisions based on inaccurate information.

Here are some steps to take if you’re using the RJMetrics platform, but you can easily apply these to your own reporting structure as well.

1. First, find out who owns the report – You may know this by the owner of a shared dashboard or the owner of the email summary. If you need help – reach out to support@rjmetrics.com and let us know the name of the report – we can locate it for you!
2. Once you have regained access to the report that you need, you’ll want to dig a little deeper so that you fully understand how it was created. This may be more or less work depending on your starting knowledge of your data.
3. Start by researching what metrics are used in the report and check out how they are defined.
4. Are there filters applied at the metric level or within the report?
5. What date range is being used?
6. Next, find out where the data comes from. You can check out the Integrations Page and the Data Warehouse Manager in your account for details on this. If you are new to the RJMetrics platform or using data warehouses in general, you’ll likely have questions. Don’t worry – our team is here to help. Check out our Help Center for a guide on understanding databases and reach out to our team with any specific questions.
7. Finally – what do you do if you notice a discrepancy or need to edit the report?
8. You can easily save a copy of the report and make changes using the Visual Report Builder.
9. If you are unsure of what to do or where to begin, you’ll want to reach out to the person who manages your website internally and/or the RJMetrics analyst team.

From there, you’ll want to take the initiative to share this knowledge with the rest of your team. As I mentioned earlier, it’s really important to have transparency so that everyone understands how data is used to make decisions. Not only does it breed confidence in the numbers, but also it gives everyone a sense of ownership, which can lead to both greater insights and better questions. You can achieve this by encouraging more teammates to be more than passive consumers of data, and to actually log-in to the platform and create their own reports. There is no need to be shy!

Here at RJMetrics, it’s no surprise that our team is passionate about data, but just like in any organization it can be easy to rely too much on a single expert or a specific team. We’ve even been victims of this exact problem in the past (Check out this article that warns about the dreaded Bus Factor of One)! Now, we know from personal experience that sharing both the knowledge and responsibility across the entire team is paramount to our success. Data-driven decision-making is just a motto unless everyone takes part!