You can also like or comment on any of your colleagues’ posts to show your encouragement and support for them.

You may refer to the sample story on the right for your post. please note that your story has to include your company email address at the bottom of the post, and has to be submitted by Monday, 7 March, 6pm (Local Time).

As I progressed and learnt new things, I realised some of our tools were limited. One of my product managers asked for a Gantt chart so that we would be able to see our progress better and understand where we stand in a project. I tried various ways with tools available to chart out a simple Gantt chart. But none of them was flexible enough to be able to be used for the intended purpose within my team. So instead of finding templates after templates, I decided to make my own, using Google Sheets. 

With a bit of research, I managed to create a very simple Gantt chart that meets the needs of the team. Does it need more improvements? Sure. But does it fulfil its intended purpose? Yes. Happily, I shared this Gantt chart template with my manager and he was impressed with it and asked if I could share it with other teams too. I agreed and there were positive feedback as well as feedback on what can be improved. I was glad that I was able to make such a simple tool to be so useful within my team and other teams. On top of creating this tool, I also gained some new skills by coding a little in google sheets, learning the many possible functionalities and features within it.

I would like to thank my product managers for openly giving me feedback on my project management skills and allowing me to take the opportunity to get out of my comfort zone to do something that adds value to our team and others.

lois.ngmhm@seamoney.com

Having some background in art, I knew that I could get inspiration from my surroundings. I started to actively observe the aesthetics of the tools my colleagues were using. I also listened to their rants during lunches and group chats. I raised their concerns in my meetings and asked a fellow designer, from another project, questions and asked for feedback. I learned that most developers prefer dark themed products (in IDEs, terminals and even installed dark theme plugin in their browsers). WCAG colour contrast is extremely useful for deciding colours as different people prefer different orientations and sizings for their window. I tried my best to incorporate these designs into the product.

The project was successfully launched in 6 months. My data engineer friend texted me that he was thankful that there was finally a product that uses dark theme. That project has now been utilised and expanded for 2+ years across several countries. After its successful launch, my backend developers and my boss then recommended me to design for another product which was also launched with good feedback.

Interesting problems and innovative solutions comes from all of us. It could be a rant, a repetitive action, a behaviour or usage preferences. Nowadays I don't do design anymore, but the experience will carry on with me in my problem solving.

daphne.won@shopee.com

My team collaborates with our colleagues in other regions’ local teams to create accurately labelled data needed to create machine learning or deep learning models (a program working in the background) which automatically sift through user-submitted ID documents to predict if they are authentic or not. Such models save the effort of said colleagues who would normally have to look at these, many times thousands of, documents each day before approving them -- a truly tedious process!

An issue I noticed was that work on the data had sometimes fallen short of quality and at times was put behind schedule. Given the also tedious nature of data labelling, this came as no surprise to me. But accepting the situation as it was was  not in anyone's interest. I set out to solve any issue within my control.

What I soon found out was that given our local teams’ numerous responsibilities, data labelling was often prioritised behind the approval work which was more urgent -- the very work our models were being built to reduce! And the reason for that was that our colleagues doing the actual labelling process often did not understand the purpose of the work they were doing in a way that made sense to them (we are not building ‘a model’, we are building ‘a system which automatically reduces approval work’). It was a problem of unaligned motivations which was thankfully easy to fix!

Thanks to the support and autonomy given to me by my manager, I immediately set out to change my team’s SOP to ensure that all colleagues were vividly aware of what they were creating labelled data for. I also started working much closer with them on an individual level to ensure that problems with quality were resolved before they had a chance to become gargantuan, and planned schedules for our work around their urgent responsibilities, like being on standby during campaign periods.

Since these changes had been made, our work has since started to be completed in a timely manner and with much better quality, reducing the need for do-overs. We used the Team Engagement Fund to buy snacks from sources overseas late last year to celebrate our deeper collaboration together.

While I am still rummaging through Confluence, scratching at my head while pounding at my keyboard each day, it looks like that non-IT background will continue to be of good use!

PS: For the inclined, find out what the Identity Verification team does in the Seatalk forum post: Team Feature - Reg Data Science (Identity Verification) posted on 2021-11-23

bryan.chongsr@shopee.com