Overview
Over the past year, a large healthcare company has been building a data science team to look at issues related to capacity and staffing. The team consists of:
- The chief data scientist
- A data engineer
- A visualization expert to design the UI (user interface)
- A data analyst
The team is also managed by a nontechnical manager who joined the team from the central scheduling office.
The team is tasked with a very large project: developing an application that predicts the scheduling/staffing needs for the hospital. The application will include scheduling needs for all patient-facing staff—nurses, doctors, admissions staff, and all other medical-related personnel. The team will apply machine learning techniques to the hospital’s historical census, admissions data, and any other available hospital data the team identifies to be useful in building predictive models for the application. The models will be trained and tested. All patient personally identifiable information (PII) will be removed before the team has access to the data.
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Write My Essay For MeThe project has kicked off despite the difficulty in hiring a chief data scientist to lead the team. The data engineer was the first member of the team. For the first few months after the project started, the data engineer had to supervise the data analyst and the visualization expert while performing the technical aspects of the job. Since tasks like visualization design usually start a little later in the development cycle, the visualization expert assisted the engineer in building data diagrams and other tasks related to the database development, and the analyst assisted with data evaluation and cleansing work. About six months into the work, a nontechnical manager was brought in to manage the project and lead the team.
After several more months had passed, the company finally was able to recruit a chief data scientist, Sarah. Until that point, the team did not have any expertise in machine learning and predictive analytics—skills that were key to the project. The data scientist typically is responsible for vetting the data sources based on discussions with business owners and subject matter experts. With this knowledge of the data, the data scientist works closely with the data engineer to ensure the data is transformed and stored in a format that the data scientist can work with.
Certain team dynamics were established due to the delay in hiring a data scientist. The nontechnical manager, officially the team supervisor and project manager, had some business knowledge from a former position managing central scheduling for the flagship hospital. Most of the manager’s time was spent performing the role of business analyst for the data engineer, providing business knowledge and information on data that would normally have been gathered by the data scientist. The manager spent any remaining time “managing up” or reporting to upper management, rather than managing the staff. As the most technical person on the team, the data engineer functioned as the de facto team lead, and the nontechnical manager functioned as the business analyst on the team.
Once on board, the chief data scientist, Sarah, took on the role of technical lead. Sarah also insisted on meeting with subject matter experts from the relevant areas and reviewing and revising the database design work that had been performed prior to her arrival. She also began assigning data-specific tasks to the other two team members who had been assisting the engineer up to this point. This caused some friction, since the team members were accustomed to the data engineer assigning their work. Some of the tasks Sarah gave them appeared to be contrary to the direction the data engineer had given them up to this point regarding the data design.
While Sarah viewed herself as the technical lead, she assumed that the nontechnical manager was responsible for project and staff oversight. Sarah did not understand the dynamic that had been occurring with the nontechnical manager serving on the team as a business analyst for the data engineer. She began to feel that her direction was being blocked by the data engineer with the help of the other two technical staff members. She took the issue to the nontechnical manager to seek support, based on her assumptions of the nontechnical manager’s responsibilities.
The project is now three months behind schedule to deliver a pilot model to test at one of the hospitals. The delay is attributed to the lag in hiring the chief data scientist and the dynamics that surfaced surrounding the management of the team and the project.
Several factors could impact how the manager handles this situation:
- The team has been relying on the data engineer for all technical direction to this point.
- The team has essentially been working for the data engineer. The manager has been working as a regular team member instead of being the manager. All direction has been coming from the data engineer.
- The project is already three months behind. A change in the direction on the underlying data design could cause further delays.
- The chief data scientist has informed the manager that they cannot work with the current design without some major modifications.
- The data engineer is not receptive to the change.
- The data engineer has built a working relationship with the team that the chief data scientist does not have.
- It took months to find and hire the chief data scientist, who is critical to providing key skills required for the project—the predictive model.
- The data analyst seems to have issues completing work that they have started, which has impacted the workflow of the rest of the team.
To this point, the nontechnical manager had taken on key roles to keep the project moving forward, given the absence of a key resource on the team. The delay was not due to any deficiencies in the abilities of the nontechnical manager.
Prompt
Given the case as described, provide an analysis of the situation as it exists and describe how you think the nontechnical manager could best handle this situation to keep the project moving forward.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:
- What emotional intelligence strategies should the nontechnical manager use to handle this situation? Explain your reasoning.
- What are the biggest challenges that the team faces? Explain your reasoning.
- How can the team bring cohesion back to the team?
- Explain the various shifts in roles among the team members.
- Identify the challenges that a team faces when actually completing the work.
- What interpersonal dynamics between members of the team have the most influence on the situation?
- Consider the functional roles the members of the team have occupied up to this point and how they have interacted with each other in the performance of the roles.
- Identify two or three different strategies that could have been used to prevent the conflict from escalating the way that it did. For each strategy, explain how it might have helped the situation.
- Would a more technical manager be better able to resolve this situation in a positive way? Why or why not?
- Moving forward, how do you think the team should proceed?
- Specifically, identify the tasks that each person on the team should be responsible for and explain your reasoning.
- How will identifying the roles and tasks each team member is responsible for help the dynamics of the team?
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