Which parts of your project are based on trust rather than verified skill?

I once worked on a team building a new customer relationship system. We had a brilliant data analyst, Sofia, who was known for her “magic touch” with numbers. Whenever a tricky data question came up for our Power BI reports, everyone would just say, “Ask Sofia, she’ll handle it.” We all trusted her completely. The problem was, Sofia did handle it, but sometimes her “magic” involved a lot of manual workarounds and complex, undocumented calculations. It wasn’t about her skill, but about our trust in her to make it work, no matter how.

This story highlights a common trap in projects: relying on trust where you should be relying on verified skill. It’s like trusting a single Wi-Fi router for your entire office building. You trust it will work, but when it goes down, everything stops because there’s no backup and no one else knows how it’s really configured.

Think about your own projects. Where do you find yourselves saying things like:

• “Don’t worry, John always gets those Qlik Sense dashboards updated on time.”
• “I’m sure Mary will figure out how to pull that data for the Power BI report.”
• “We don’t need to document this; Emily knows how it works.”

These statements often point to areas built on trust in an individual’s capacity, rather than a proven, repeatable process or widely distributed expertise. It’s not that trust is bad; it’s essential for teamwork. But unchecked trust can mask hidden risks.

When projects lean too heavily on individual trust, several things can go wrong:

• Single Points of Failure: What happens if John gets sick, or Mary leaves the company? That “magic touch” disappears, and suddenly, no one knows how to update those critical Qlik Sense dashboards. Your project hits a brick wall.
• Hidden Complexities: Like Sofia’s undocumented calculations, relying on individual genius can mean that complex parts of your project—like data transformations for a Power BI model—are not understood by anyone else. This makes them hard to maintain, debug, or improve.
• Lack of Scalability: If a process relies on one person’s manual effort, it won’t scale when your project grows. Imagine if every new customer data point for your BI system needed a manual entry from one trusted person. It quickly becomes unsustainable.
• Burnout: The trusted individuals often become overloaded. They’re constantly called upon, leading to stress, errors, and eventually, burnout. Their “skill” becomes a burden.

So, how do you move from a foundation of trust to one of verified skill?

It starts with transparency and documentation. When Sofia was asked to build a complex data model for a new Power BI report, the team could have insisted on clear documentation of her steps, or even a pair-programming session where someone else learned her methods. For Qlik Sense, it means having standardized coding practices and peer reviews for new applications, ensuring that multiple team members understand the logic.

Next, it involves cross-training and knowledge sharing. If only one person knows how to manage a critical data connector for your BI tools, ensure they teach others. Regularly schedule internal workshops or “lunch and learns” where team members share their specific knowledge.

Finally, it’s about process over personality. Instead of saying “John will handle it,” the discussion shifts to, “What’s the process for ensuring these Qlik Sense dashboards are updated accurately and on time, regardless of who does it?” This means defining clear workflows, setting up automated checks, and establishing quality control measures that aren’t dependent on one person’s unverified expertise.

Where in your current projects do you find yourselves saying, “I just trust so-and-so to take care of that”? What would happen if that “so-and-so” wasn’t available tomorrow? How could you transform those areas of implicit trust into explicit, verifiable processes or shared skills?