Leading Biotech Data Teams

Chapter 2. Building Collaborations

Now that you’ve broadened your team’s scope and objectives, you’ll need to adjust how you interact with the other teams in your organization to reflect your new role driving the organization’s scientific objectives. The four Reciprocal Development Principles in this chapter will help you rethink how you interact with your colleagues, particularly those in the wet lab.

The Agile principles were developed in the context of software teams working with external users where the requirements are built around supporting what the user needs to do. The technical team doesn’t ask the users to do things differently—collecting more data or redesigning experiments. And technical teams within the same organization as their users tend to be seen the same way—supporting the teams doing the real work, instead of driving it.

To drive the organization’s scientific objectives on equal footing with your bench scientist colleagues, your data team needs to interact with them in a new way. Supporting your colleagues in their own objectives is part of that, but they need to support you too—generating the data you need and adjusting experiments to incorporate your results. You need to be willing and able to push them to work in ways that will make the overall organization more effective.

The four principles in this chapter will help you build this new kind of relationship with the other teams in your organization, and adjust your leadership to reflect the needs of this ...