The project mix – small and large
People have short attention spans. No surprise there, but what does that mean for you? How will you counteract the tendency of people to lose focus? How will you keep stakeholders and sponsors engaged with your team and in the projects you are undertaking?
The project mix has a great deal to do with stakeholder engagement, team satisfaction, and workload consistency. My experience shows that a senior data scientist can work on two major projects and multiple smaller projects, around two or three, all simultaneously.
When I first tried this idea with an analytics team, it was unanimous. The staff all came to me individually and explained that there was too much work and that it could not be done. I suggested to each team member that they try the new system. Also, I suggested that they keep an eye on work-life balance and to not increase their hours to try to accomplish the work more quickly.
The team found that the gating factors...
