When to separate Squads and Teams into their own Tables

[Mary_Schafrath1]

Hi there! I have a bit of a math problem I'm looking to solve:

I manage a Department with about 85 Software Designers, which are assembled into 15 Squads, which support 3 different categories of software products. And about 1/3 of the work they do is product-agnostic (like onboarding, up-skilling, tooling maintenance, etc). 

I'm building of Airtable Interfaces so that Designers, Leads, Managers, and our VP have access to the project information that matters to them. I'm just a little stuck on how best to architect these Tables.

Should house alllllll the Projects/Tasks (Epics/Stories) from all 85 Designer practitioners in ONE Table, and then group and parce with other Tables and/or Tags?

OR should I create 3 Tables for each of the slightly different product categories (since that kind of makes sense ) and just accept that Practitioners will need to toggle around a bit in the Team's Interface?

Also, would separating my Department's project work into 3 Tables mess me up when I'm putting together our Department Interfaces for Managers and VP (who will need to see cross-department data)??

Thanks in advance!
Mary

[David_Skinner]

It's hard to know exactly what your requirements are from this but, in general, you don't want to be separating out similar objects (e.g. Projects) into separate tables. That would usually mean you've got something in your architecture wrong. If you get your architecture right then a lot of problems can be avoided down the line. Presenting the relevent data to different stakeholders can always be done by filtering in Interfaces if you have the architecture correct. 

You should probably have your Projects set up in a three table hierarchy (If Tasks are different from and belong to Projects):

Software Product Categories table > Projects table  > Tasks table

Your Designers should be organised in a separate two table hierarchy:
Squads table > Designers table

How these two separate hierarchies relate to each other depends on how your organisation works. But most likely your Designers will be linked to your Projects table and/or your Tasks table.