10 ways to go from a toxic to a healthy ad-hoc request culture

Ad-hoc requests have a bad reputation.

At their worst, they are a data team’s nemesis - distracting the team from ‘valuable’ and ‘interesting’ projects, causing loads of rework, without having any idea how important any of these requests really are.

Most often though they are a reason for data teams not to make big changes: “I can’t build a metric tree or think about structure changes, our team is drowning in ad-hoc requests. We don’t have time for anything else.”

However, there is another world in which ad-hoc requests are not the monster we imagine. Where ad-hoc simply demonstrate a curiosity and a desire to use data to understand their own world. Where a ‘quick question’ could be an olive branch, inviting data teams into the business’s biggest challenges.