Community Voices: Adrian Alzona - 5 Personality Traits to Look for When Expanding a Team

Miran Saric

Author: Adrian Alzona

In this installment of Community Voices, we welcome guest author Adrian Alzona, Director of Information Technology of the Rossdown Group of Companies. Rossdown, as a group, is a farm-to-plate poultry business that operates in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. As the Director of IT, Adrian leads the technological strategy, vision, and advancement of Rossdown from manual farming to automation. Since 2016, some immense technological advancements have been executed successfully, making Rossdown one of the leading poultry manufacturing businesses that leverages automation. From production machinery to online EDI transactions with customers to big data management, Rossdown continue to practice and research ongoing improvements using technology.

What makes a great Board developer? Here are five personality traits to look for in a candidate when planning to expand the team.

This individual should hold a key role in the organization and should be the person administering and developing in Business Intelligence. Yes, we all know that good knowledge in SQL, database concepts, ETL Process, and database principles goes without saying. However, what may set a good developer apart from just a technician to a super developer that people want to interact with could be the key to making Business Intelligence the true, trusted tool for information. “If you build it, they will look”.

Having a functioning and trusted information medium is key to the health of a business, as the reporting piece helps make decisions. So, what makes a great developer in Board? Here are the five traits.

1. Must love data. This person must be in love with their job of mining and swimming in data. They love looking at it, creating pieces, queries, or procedures, and they love the analysis. If they love it, it will come out in their work, and the audience will end up loving it as well.
2. Ability to talk and be approachable. Each analysis or revision of a dashboard has to involve the original requester(s) or audience. Talk to the stakeholders.
3. Describe to the audience what is in their head. Look for someone who has the personality to be able to discuss or translate what is in their head. Also, find someone who can successfully describe what issues they are having.
4. Forward thinker. An ideal candidate is someone who can see or predict two steps ahead. If I make the change here, what ripple effect will result? Someone who can also see through that alerting systems may be helpful is beneficial. Create a mechanism that alerts when a data read overnight fails.
5. Time Management. Yes, we all want the perfect data set and can hyper analyze it to death. However, C-Level people are not usually prepared for perfection or chasing it right down to the $1 and waiting 50-100 days more for what they asked for. Be able to identify that 90-10 does work sometimes.

Do not underestimate the power of analytics for your business. Being able to have a robust tool that enables you to make business decisions with more confidence is worth its weight in the investments!

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Fethi ZERARA

Thank you for this insightful article, Adrian! Your emphasis on the importance of these five musts is spot on. Great content!