A big part of my role is getting out there in front of business partners to keep the things that we do well front of mind. If you manage this work in the traditional sense, you'll be invisible when things go well and shat-upon as soon as anything goes wrong. At my current organization, I've really had to work at this. Here's a story:
Once upon a time I managed (and, frankly, also wrote a lot of the code for) a project integrating half a dozen sources each managing a block of our business (billing, coverage, claims). The data was awful coming in and we managed to get a bunch of business processes changed in addition to some pretty heavy cleansing steps that we wrote. In any case, this big fragmented mess of monthly and weekly stacked data became my integrated, clean warehouse. For the first time ever at this organization, I had coverage and claims records tying up at a rate of 100% without any manual intervention. We did this so that we could implement a modern finance ops process on top (being intentionally vague) that would allow us to manage this block more efficiently, save time, and even let us better invest - it was a 2 year project including my data work. A handful of actuaries and analysts got promoted out of this as it was a BFD to the company. Yet, at the end of the year, when I got my review I got our equivalent of the average rating, 3 of 5, etc, and like a 3% raise, and a shitty budget for my people too. From then on, I spent almost as much time out there promoting our team's work as we did doing the work. We did considerably better the next year, and that's been the way I've operated ever since. I market the work.
This kind of work requires a manager who will actively market it within the organization.
