Okay, let me start by saying that I struggle with the cliché that there are no stupid questions. I say that partly because I do believe there are stupid questions out there, typically asked by people who just don’t get it or aren’t paying attention, but mainly because I was always that kid in class who said nothing for fear of looking stupid. That fear is based purely on the belief that “even if there is only one stupid question that could be asked, I’m 100% positive I’m about to ask it.”
That being said, one of the catch phrases I frequently use with the EDW team is “nobody knows it all, and nobody can know it all.” This is a direct reaction to the fact that we have data from four primary clinical systems that have entire teams for development and support. It’s unreasonable to expect the team to have all the knowledge of all the clinical teams combined. It’s similarly unreasonable to expect all of our power users (folks who have been granted a privileged level of access to the EDW) to have that same level of knowledge. The devil is always in the details… many, many details. Talk with any domain expert and the conversation quickly starts to use qualifying words like “usually”, “sometimes”, and “it depends.” This is the nature of the complexity of data and business processes, and part of what makes our jobs interesting. To help resolve this domain expertise challenge, we’ve created a single listserv and strongly encourage (to the point of mandating) that all our users send questions to that list. That way, we start to build up a large group of domain experts and create an active discussion around many of the topics that come up. Best of all, because it’s all documented, any user can search the previous messages for information.
To be honest, convincing folks to use the list is a bit of a challenge for the same reason that I was reluctant to ask questions in high school – nobody wants to look stupid in front of their peers. This is further compounded by the complex political relationships among the three groups that use the EDW. There’s a definite undercurrent among them that everyone should know everything about their jobs, and to ask a question could have the side effect of saying, “I don’t know how to do my job.”
This “nobody knows it all” credo applies to other components of work culture beyond just healthcare IT domain knowledge. We’ve all got our general skills and knowledge, but everyone has their specialties and areas of deep expertise. I expect everyone on the EDW team to be facile with SQL, but that’s just at the base of skills. The more important – and far more interesting and productive – skills are the ones you can’t really advertise for. I’m talking about the experience with using web crawlers for secondary purposes, the solid .NET background, the Perl and regex mastery, and the seriously deep domain knowledge. These are the skills that we’ve all built up over time and can be used creatively to solve problems. To use a cooking analogy, SQL skills would be a raw chicken, and something like regex mastery would be the garlic, rosemary, parsley, thyme and fennel seed that makes the chicken into a delicious meal. Those extra skills are what allow a project to grow into something beyond what was originally described 5 years ago.
But just having teammates with value-add skills isn’t enough for the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. The key component is acknowledging that a colleague may have better skills with, or a different viewpoint on something, and asking them for help. This ranges from “Hey, can you give these numbers a sniff-test?” to “I am losing my mind, can I talk through how I’m planning on approaching this problem?” to “I haven’t the faintest idea what to do here.” Fundamentally, you’re saying, “I need help,” which requires a certain amount of confidence and trust both in yourself and your colleague.Fundamentally, you’re saying, “I need help,” which requires a certain amount of confidence and trust both in yourself and your colleague. The last thing anyone wants is to be ridiculed when asking for help. (I’m extremely pleased that for all the friendly teasing and taunting that happens on the EDW team, I’ve never heard anyone ridicule anyone else for asking for help. Well… except for when Garima said, “Oh, Andrew…” when I asked a simple technical question. But her tone was more of pity for losing my technical chops. Sigh.) It also requires that your teammates are willing to help out. At the end of the day, a true teammate should want to help out a colleague to make him or her more successful; that’s what makes for a successful team and project, not to mention a fun and productive work environment.
I’m extremely proud that the team we’ve built has a fundamental drive to share information, help each other out, and work together. I love the fact that people want to sit together and keep asking me if they can knock down the 4′ walls between their desks to enhance communication. (I’m all for it, except that there’s power and networking in them there walls, so it’s a non-trivial removal.) I can’t really imagine the alternatives, but I have to believe we would be in a very different place without everyone’s collaboration and cooperation.