Workforce Scheduling - Mind Mapping

Challenge:    I work as a Data Science Product Manager at a mid-stage marketing tech start-up and  responsible for managing the Machine Learning team by coming up with Data Science projects  and assigning them based on people’s expertise and project deadlines defined by the  management. Since the company is going through a growth phase, many of us are involved in  multiple projects of different levels of priority at a time with interdependencies on each other.    Now, it’s of paramount importance that priorities are well defined so that the project deadlines  don’t suffer, the idle time of people is minimized and redundancy among work is reduced. It’s a  classic case of the employee scheduling problem given the priorities and constraints. The  composition of the company comprises of 5 product managers and 20 developers with expertise  in engineering, machine learning, back-end, and UI. Generally speaking, each project has a  product manager, two engineers, two data scientists, two back-end engineers, and one  business analyst. And at a time, there are 10-12 ongoing projects. The challenge is to define  pipelines for various projects based on their priorities and resource availability in the most  effective way.      Selection:    Mind mapping is a great way to align the organization around a common understanding of the  current reality. In the mind mapping process, we capture requirements, priorities, and availability  of various stakeholders unified towards the fulfillment of projects within defined deadlines.  Colleagues are involved in order to develop a common mind among them regarding the current  reality of a design challenge so they are better acquainted with other peoples’ tasks as well.  With this exercise, we’ll have shared insights from various stakeholders to come to an  agreement regarding how to assign resources for various projects in the most optimal manner.       Application:    With the mind mapping tool, I prepared a set of questionnaires that would address critical  problems like a) availability of employees, b) the expertise of employees, c) expected time of  project completion, and d) priorities of their projects. Now, in order to ease out the  decision-making process, which is to take into account all employees’ remarks, this  questionnaire is given a limited number of choices for every problem. For instance: a) Priorities:  Very High, High, Medium, Low. b) Expected time of completion: Half-day, 1 day, 2 days, 3 days,  one week, and so on. This division would help to cluster the requirements from various  stakeholders.

Workforce Scheduling - Mind Mapping

This survey is distributed at two levels: 1) within a team. 2) across teams. Every team conducts  an internal discussion to club their requirements and expectations at a team level to propose  their availability of resources and priorities across teams. This first round of internal discussion  is expected to take one hour. The second round of discussion is inter-team, where product  managers would direct the priorities and requirements of the projects and based on these  needs, the engineers would indicate their availability, expertise and expected time of  completion. Since this round includes all stakeholders with various types of requirements, a  debate is expected, and that roughly increases the discussion time to 3 hours.     This approach involves dealing with ‘Very High’ priorities and ‘High’ priorities projects first by  assigning them all the resources needed. Followed by availability and expertise taking the  center-stage for Medium and Low priority projects. This exercise is conducted once a week. Any  change in the status quo is first notified to the respective internal team and it is then taken up in  the weekly meetings.      Insight:    By applying the mind mapping tool, employees now have a clear understanding of the ongoing  high priority projects. They’re better able to manage their time and the roles they are required to  play for each project. Since each employee is now aware of the others’ tasks, they can also  provide a helping hand based on their expertise and it’s lead to less redundancy.     Using this tool, we are essentially developing a pipeline for employees considering their project  priorities by defining parallel working schedules across teams, making use of reusable  components and ensure project deliveries within the defined deadlines.        Approach:     Given the fact that some creative way of practically achieving the defined company roadmap,  that could take in all possible expectations, expertise, and constraints, was required, Mind  Mapping Tool is an appropriate tool for this problem. Based on the introduction of new  constraints for fresh projects, more features can be brainstormed to include in the survey.

