Guests in our home are often very generous with their compliments on my cooking skills. While I sincerely wish those compliments were deserved, the sad (and, okay, shocking) truth is that they are not.

I’m not a great cook: rather, I am an excellent assembler of food that other people have created. I know where to shop, and the way to put together terrific dishes, and I know how to pour a generous glass of wine (or three). These skills appear to convince people that I know how to cook.

Here’s another thing I’m great at assembling: fun, smart, wildly talented, highly collaborative, and productive professional teams. What’s my secret? I know that unicorns aren’t real.

Unfortunately many health and healthcare organizations, rather than working to assemble these types of teams, persist in hunting unicorns. They assume that one person can posses every skill required to create compelling and clear analysis and reporting.

These organizations need to stop the fairy-tale hunt, and start building data-analytics and communications teams. The idea that any one analyst or staff person will ever have every single bit of knowledge and skill in health and healthcare, technical applications, and data visualization and design required to deliver beautiful and compelling dashboards, reports, and infographics is just – well, sheer lunacy.

3 Tips for Building Data-Analytics and Reporting Teams

Tip 1: Search For Characteristics & Core Competencies

To build a great team, you need to understand what characteristics and core competencies are required to complete the work. Here’s where to begin:

• Curiosity. When teams are curious they, question, probe, and inquire. Curiosity is a crucial impetus for uncovering interesting and important stories in our health and healthcare data. Above all else, you need a team of curious people! (Read my previous post about this here.)

• Health & Healthcare Subject-Matter Expertise. Team members with front-line, boots-on-the-ground, clinical, operational, policy, financial, and research experience and expertise are essential for identifying the questions of interest and the decisions or needs of the stakeholders for and to whom data is being analyzed and communicated.

• Data Analysis and Reporting. Without exception, at least one member of your team must have math, statistics, and data-analysis skills. Experience with data modeling is a plus if you can find it; at a minimum, some familiarity with the concept of modeling is very helpful. The ability to use data-analysis, reporting, and display tools and applications is also highly desirable, but another more technically trained IT team member may be able to bring this ability to the table if necessary.

• Technical: IT & Database Expertise. Often, groups will confuse this skill area with data-analysis and reporting competence. Data and database architecture and administration require an entirely different set of skills from those needed for data analysis, so it’s important not to conflate the two. You’ll need team members who know how to extract, load, and transform (ETL) and architect data for analysts to use. And while you may sometimes find candidates who have both skill-sets, don’t assume that the presence of one means a lock on the other.

• Data Visualization & Visual Intelligence. Knowledge of best practices and awareness of current research is required to create clear, useful, and compelling dashboards, reports and infographics. But remember, these skills are not intuitive; they must be learned and honed over time. And although it is not necessary for every team member to become an expert in this field, each should have some awareness of it to avoid working at cross-purposes with team members employing those best practices. (That is, everyone should know better than to ask for 3D red, yellow, and green pie charts.)

• Project Management. A project manager with deep analytic, dashboard, and report-creation experience is ideal – and like the mythical unicorn nearly impossible to find. But don’t let that discourage you. Often a team member can take on a management role in addition to other responsibilities, or someone can be hired who, even without deep analytics experience, can keep your projects on track and moving forward.

Tip 2: Be Prepared to Invest in Training and/or External Resources

• Why? Because they don’t teach this stuff in school.

At present, formal education at institutions of higher learning about the best practices of data visualization, and state-of-the-art visualization and reporting software applications is scarce, and competition to hire qualified data analysts is fierce. As a result, you must be prepared to invest in training the most appropriate team members in many of these new skills, and/or working with qualified external resources.

Tip 3: Have A Compass. Set a Course. Communicate It Often.

• The primary challenge for your team is not to simply and boldly wade into the data and find something interesting. Rather, team efforts should be aligned with the organization’s goals. This means that you must establish and communicate clear direction and objectives for everyone to deliver on from Day One. Having a compass and setting a well-defined course also help keep your teams from getting caught up in working on secondary or tertiary problems that are interesting, but unlikely to have significant impact on the main goal.

I do wish that data-analysis and reporting unicorns were real! Life would be so much simpler. But they aren’t and never will be, so I let go of that fantasy long ago. You should, too.