Many internal analytics projects never get past the planning stage because teams assume they need a data lake first. In practice, most start with what already exists: spreadsheets and the databases behind existing applications. The work is to check that data, consolidate it and then build on it.

Here is a short checklist we use to think through that first step.

1. Find the silos and the manual steps

List every place the same figure is kept (each department's sheet, each app's database).

Note which reports are rebuilt by hand every week or month.

Mark where teams react to problems only after they show up in a report.

2. Put validation in the pipeline, not in people's heads

Write the validation rules down and run them inside the ETL/ELT step.

Decide how exceptions are handled: rejected, flagged or routed to a person.

Use trigger-based or event-driven runs where data changes often, and scheduled runs where it does not.

3.…