How do you manage your workload in your role?

Preparation and organisation is key to performing good in your role! No matter the workload, if you follow the above two steps you can always be on top of things and achieve your goals.

As Data Scientists, the most important strategy in managing our workloads is prioritisation.  By doing so, we make sure that we work on the most important topics first, and by not working on too many topics in parallel, we can adequately cope with each requirement and handle them one after another. There are many initiatives in the TUI company that have the goal to make our business processes more data driven.  Hence, our team receives a lot of requests to support these initiatives.  Since we have only limited resources, we discuss the ideas and requests with the teams that want to realize them and then decide which initiatives can or should be supported by our team.  We usually work on projects first that promise a high benefit for the business while being not too complex in their setup. We do this to ensure that we do not agree to support more projects than we can actually handle. Furthermore, we are working in an agile way. We have scrum inspired ways of working that are based on two week sprints. That means we plan our upcoming work in a biweekly sprint planning with the whole Data Science Team. In these meetings we try to define minimum viable products (MVPs) or in other words increments for our projects that can be delivered in two weeks and that may be tested very quickly by the users to decide whether the current development direction is well suited or not. This helps us to fail fast and save time since we can see quickly whether an approach is working or not instead of working on a feature for months and just realize after this time that the product will not go into production. Also, by having our biweekly sprint meetings and communicating what our tasks for the next weeks will be, our stakeholders can plan better when they can expect tasks to be finished.

Do not forget to maintain your work-life balance. Besides that, as my colleague Beth mentioned, you will have your internal meetings, at least in any Digital and Tech role, and your own time for personal focus. If, for any reason, you feel you should change something, like not attending any of the internal meetings because you are more of a listener, to dedicate yourself to something else you feel is important, your team and your manager will be happy for you. In our teams, we appreciate honesty and transparency, and we all want to be happy when working. Trust is one of TUI's values, so do not forget to communicate this in advance.