With more and more people joining the firm each year and the rise of a new office in Leuven, it’s fair to say that In The Pocket keeps on growing. With growth, however, companies risk losing the overview of the ins and outs of their people and the products they work on. But what if we added some data science into the mix?  

Data for the people, by the people

Who is working on what? Which team members are close? And who should work together more often? Faced with these questions, our Machine Learning team put their heads together. The goal: understand how we can capture and expose these interactions and how we can use them to support our colleagues in their careers and ambitions.

Credits where credit’s due. Cedric, our data-scientist intern, took the first steps and started investigating if data science was the right tool for this job. Together with the team, we analysed the available data on how the people at In The Pocket work (thank you, Jira!) in hopes of finding and mapping useful insights. And we did. 

Reaping the fruits of internal data

For a couple of weeks, our team looked at different ways to gain and visualise insights. We combined our findings into a rewind tool that summarises a selected employee’s year at In The Pocket. 

The first result is based on plotting out the different accounts and clients a specific person worked on. This way, we can visualise how people divide their time and see the shifts between multiple projects. Highly valuable for our team and tribe leads, as they can consult an overview of what, when and how much their colleagues are working on a specific project and allow for an objective, high level overview of the colleague's direction over the year.

As a second result, we dug a bit deeper into how people work together. We worked out a heat map that shows which colleagues spend the most time together and which weeks they worked together. This gives us a good idea of who they tend to team up with, who they already know, and who they don’t know yet. We want to use this to guide our internal 360 reviews, to detect organically growing teams and to identify who we should get to know next at the company.

What’s next? 

These results are only the starting point of a much bigger project. By analysing this data further, we can provide team leads with a better understanding of their team, bring more employees together and make sure we never lose the organic oversight of the talented people that work here at In The Pocket. What can we say? We love data.