xavier's blog

Liberty Lake, WA in 2016, I had the opportunity to be an intern at Itron, Inc., a technology company for utility meters, smart meters, and data management of utilities.

As an intern, I was surprised by the daunting task given to me which was to come up with an end-to-end solution for the aging data pipeline for the Finance and Sales departments.

In the pipeline at the time, 250 reports were generated everyday accounting for $500 million in finance.

In the span of three months, I had to learn quickly. From the tools used and the people I should know who can help with the project.

Mentorship for the role was available and my co-workers were happy to help in my project. But given the unique nature of my project, I needed to make relationships with different types of roles since each person had a slice view into my project; e.g. a Software Engineer could advise with the programming of the infrastructure, a Finance Director could counsel on what format reports looked like, or an Accountant give guidance on how data was used in their department.

A useful habit was writing everything down. As time went on and direction of the solution changed, having some kind of notes, schematics, or diagrams of past ideas gave a historical timeline of what worked and what didn't work.

When gathering requirements from the sample of 230 salespeople who depended on the data pipeline, organizing feedback, feature requests, and notes didn't just help, it was critical to the success of the project.

Another lesson I learned was to identify and include the stakeholders early. It took some time to find the owners of the data sources needed to make the solution happen.