My story with Roche

I work as a Portfolio/Project management member for Business Operations team inside engineering department. At the time I started, data is stored everywhere: Google Sheets, Snowflake, in-house system... It is also happened to my predecessor's documents.

For my first months, I have learnt the current workflow, understood business logic and how things connected together. Also I learnt the regulatory, took mandatory training.

Since 2nd month I organized and rebuilt the dataflow. From business view, I must keep everything simple and keep the old input because it is nearly impossible to implement a huge change on how a project/portfolio recorded. From technical view, I can only use Google Apps Script for automation.

And Google Sheets is not really a database. It is a spreadsheet program. But it doesn't matter.

I recreate the pipeline to aggregate data. Debug. Optimize. Deal with Apps Script's 6-minute runtime. Expand. The old code can only extract and aggregate less than 150 files before timing out. Now it works flawless with more than 300 files and even more thanks to the parallel executing (which I learnt during some Javascript courses).

Then, the visualized report. We use Tableau. Power BI sometimes. Looker sometimes. It also doesn't matter. If you are familiar with one tool, you will be adapted to other fast. Technology stack is quite simple. Data on Google Sheets, data on snowflake, read access to database for internal, some apis rule on backend, visualization tool... I worked with Postgresql at home, so no problem on setting up connection either directly or ODBC. The hard part is business requirement. Which part of data is useful? What should I take and bring to the report? This is not the solo work. I sit with my colleagues to solve that problem. I think we did well for the report.

Yes we actually did well. Because after 6th month I was involved into some works with other teams regarding benchmarking projects. I believe my role as a project management student made some impacts. I sit between tech team and business team, translating the needs and what is possible.

2 months left at the moment I write this. Now I'm documenting my work and code to my successor.