Best Practices for Managing Turnover in Data Science Groups, Teams, and Labs

Abstract

Turnover is a fact of life for any project, and academic research teams can face particularly high levels of people who come and go through the duration of a project. In this article, we discuss the challenges of turnover and some potential practices for helping manage it, particularly for computational- and data-intensive research teams and projects. The topics we discuss include establishing and implementing data management plans, file and format standardization, workflow and process documentation, clear team roles, and check-in and check-out procedures.