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An organization's data teams often face complex projects with a variety of resources and dispersed structures. As the number of projects and team members increases, information becomes more confusing and increasingly complex to manage. That is why we need to consolidate information on a single platform.
A platform can be used to manage the knowledge of our team: Notion. Designed for productivity and collaboration between people and teams, Notion can be useful for a data team, functioning as anything from a note-taking app to a project management tool, while also utilizing databases. to manage our tasks and collaborate with others.
In this article, we will learn how to efficiently manage data team knowledge using the Notion platform. Let's get into it.
Knowledge Management with Notion
As mentioned above, Notion is a platform for productivity and collaboration in one place. We can share our knowledge while working on updating a project with other team members.
Let's test the platform to get familiar with how we can work with it. When you register and log in to the Notion platform, you should see something similar to the image below.
You will be asked if you want to use Notion. In our case we will use it as a team. Fill out the necessary information and invite any team member in your organization.
Once you enter the platform, you will see something like the image below.
These are Notion platforms that we can use to manage our work. When we select Notion to work with, we see the Private and Teamspaces sections on the left side. We'll explore Teamspaces for our work, but I'll just explain a little about how to add members to your team since this article will focus on knowledge management.
Project and tasks
With that said, let's start by setting up the Project and Tasks page. We can add them manually, but Notion already offers numerous templates. So, let's go to the Templates tab on the left side, select the Work tab, then select Projects and Tasks.
Add the template to your preferred Teamspaces and you'll see the pages are now active.
Within the Projects and Tasks page, you can manage all the team's work tasks efficiently. Within the template, you can:
- Set project name
- Add tasks for each project
- Set and change task status, assigned, priority and deadline
- Set task priority and tag group
Continuing down, you will be able to see the database tabs where you can check the active tasks, timeline, dashboard and many others.
On this single page, we can easily control all the projects and tasks that are important to the team.
For the data team, the Project and Tasks page can also be used to handle data project management and related tasks. For example:
- Separate each data science project and describe the project objectives, data sources, stakeholders, and technologies used.
- For each data project, add a separate documentation link
- For each data science project, list the data collection, feature engineering, model training, and validation tasks.
- Assign each team member the task, the detail and the detailed description of what they must do.
- In each task, provide links to the code base and the necessary learning materials.
For example, this is how we can have a data science project and its related tasks on the Project and Tasks page.
If you click on the project name, you can set the description of each project much more clearly and embed the necessary links or files. For example, I created a new property to attach my documentation file to.
It is also possible to have much more detailed information for each task. You can view the page below by selecting the side view on each task.
We can add the information necessary to complete the task, and all the resources to complete it. Additionally, we can comment on the task to facilitate collaboration and information sharing between team members.
This is a simple exploration of how data teams can benefit from the Projects and Tasks page. Let's move on to providing a more detailed documentation page.
Documentation
Documentation is the heart of any data project. Without it, a lot of information would be lost and difficult to transfer to other team members.
Dedicating a separate page to documentation is a good practice, since we don't want one content to interfere with the other. That's why we created our documentation-only page.
On the left side, you'll see a Team Wiki template that we can use. Select this and choose Engineering Wiki as it is the closest to data teaming.
You can view the Wiki documentation below once you select the right one for your work.
You can organize all the technical information needed for your project or the entire team on individual pages as you see fit. For example, you can add your code base for each of the projects. Let's take a look at one of these pages.
As you can see, the Notion Wiki template already provides a simple explanation for each page.
For data teams, you can add a variety of things related to data work, including:
- Data sources
- List of machine learning models
- Preprocessing techniques
- Data governance
- ai Guide
The Wiki is a perfect place for the team to put all the knowledge they already have in one place.
You can combine the documentation Wiki page we have with the Documents page from the beginning.
It is a dedicated list of documents with all the information related to the document project.
Related to the above, we can also put all the meeting information in one place using Meetings.
By combining all the available pages, we can have live Notion documentation that you and your team can easily access and manage efficiently.
Conclusion
As your data team grows, the information and resources used to do your work can become seemingly unmanageable. Information could get tangled everywhere if not managed correctly, causing project delays or even failures, as well as the accumulation of future technical debt.
Wearing Notionwe can manage the knowledge of our data team in a single platform. Notion provides a place for teams to enter and retrieve all project information and related documentation efficiently. By taking advantage of pre-built templates, we can increase our productivity faster without having to start from scratch.
To improve your team's knowledge management, try to use all the features and templates available in Notionincluding Projects & Pages, Wiki, Documents, and Meeting Notes.
Cornellius Yudha Wijaya He is an assistant data science manager and data writer. While working full-time at Allianz Indonesia, he loves sharing data and Python tips through social media and print media. Cornellius writes on a variety of artificial intelligence and machine learning topics.
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