Effective knowledge management for data teams using Notion

Organizational data teams often encounter sophisticated projects involving a variety of resources and distributed structures. As the number of projects and team members increases, information becomes more tangled and more tough to manage. Therefore, we need to consolidate information on one platform.

You can apply one platform to manage our team’s knowledge: Concept. Designed with productivity and collaboration between individuals and teams in mind, Notion can be helpful for the data team because it works like everything from a note-taking app to a project management tool, while also leveraging databases to manage our tasks and collaborate with others.

In this article, we will learn how to effectively manage your team’s knowledge using data Concept platform. Let’s get on with it.

Knowledge management using the concept

As mentioned above, Concept is a platform that increases productivity and collaboration in one place. We can share our knowledge by working on updating the project with other team members.

Let’s try out the platform so we can get a feel for how we can work with it. Once you have registered and logged in to the Notion platform, you should see something similar to the image below.

You will be asked if you want to apply Notion. In our case, we will apply it as a team. Provide the necessary information and invite any team members from your organization.

Once you enter the platform, you will see something like the image below.

These are Notion platforms through which we can manage our work. When we choose Notion for work, we will see the Private and Team Spaces sections on the left. We will be exploring the areas of Teamspace in our work, but I will only explain a little about adding team members 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 many templates. So let’s go to the Templates tab on the left, select the Work tab, and then select Projects and Tasks.

Add the template to your team’s preferred areas and you’ll see that the pages are now live.

On the Projects and Tasks page, you can effectively manage all the tasks working in your team. Within the template you can:

• Set a project name
• Add tasks for each project
• Set and change task status, assigned, priority and deadline
• Set the task priority and tag group

Continuing down, you can see the database tabs where you can check your energetic tasks, timeline, board, and more.

On this one page, we can easily control all projects and tasks critical to the team.

For a data team, the Project and Tasks page can also be used to administer the data project and related tasks. For example:

• Separate each data science project and describe the project goals, data sources, stakeholders, and technologies used
• For each data project, add a separate documentation link
• For each data science project, list the tasks associated with data collection, feature engineering, model training, and validation
• Assigning each team member a task, details and a detailed description of what they should do
• In each assignment, provide links to the necessary code base and learning materials

For example, here’s how we can place a data science project and its associated tasks on the Project and Tasks page.

If you click on the project name, you can make the description of each project much clearer and embed the necessary links or files. For example, I created a recent property to include a documentation file.

It is also possible to obtain much more detailed information about each task. You can see the page below by selecting the side view in each task.

We can add the information necessary to complete the task and all the resources needed to complete it. Additionally, we can comment on a task to facilitate collaboration and information exchange between team members.

Here’s a elementary description of how data teams can benefit from the Project and Tasks page. Let’s move on to the more detailed documentation side.

Documentation

Documentation is the heart of any data project. Without this, a lot of information would be lost and tough to pass on to other team members.

Dedicating a separate page to documentation is a good practice because we don’t want one content to conflict with another. That’s why we created our documentation-only website.

On the left you will see a Team Wiki template that we can apply. Select this option and choose Engineering Wiki as it is the closest to data collaborative work.

You can see the Wiki documentation below when you choose the right one for your work.

You can organize all the technical information required for your project or your entire team on individual pages as you wish. For example, you can add a code base for each of your projects. Let’s take a look at one of these pages.

As you can see, the Notion Wiki template already includes elementary explanations for each page.

For data teams, you can add a variety of things related to working with data, including:

• Data sources
• List of machine learning models
• Pre-processing techniques
• Data management
• AI tips

A wiki is the perfect place for a team to gather all the knowledge they already have in one place.

You can link our Documentation Wiki page to the Documents page from the beginning.

This is a dedicated document list containing all information related to the document project.

Therefore, we can also put all meeting information in one place using Meetings.

By connecting all available pages, we can have up-to-date Notion documentation that you and your team can easily access and manage effectively.

Application

As your data team grows, the information and resources used to do its work can become seemingly unmanageable. Information can get tangled everywhere if not managed properly, which can cause project delays and even failures, as well as the future build-up of technical debt.

Using Conceptwe can manage our data team’s knowledge in one platform. Notion gives teams the ability to efficiently enter and search all project information and related documentation. By using predefined templates, we are able to boost our productivity faster without starting from scratch.

To improve knowledge management in your team, try to apply all available functions and templates from Conceptincluding projects and pages, Wikis, documents and meeting notes.

Cornelius Yudha Vijaya is an assistant data science manager and data writer. Working full time at Allianz Indonesia, he loves sharing Python tips and data through social media and writing media. Cornellius writes on a variety of topics related to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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