jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Strategy: Alignment | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Learning with Fist of Five Voting - Jake Calabrese We’ve talked before about the benefits of not asking your team binary yes/no questions about agreement but “on a scale of 1..5”; e.g. in #39 when mentioning the use of zoom polls. This gives people who aren’t comfortable with a direction a way to express that without coming out and saying no. And if a number of people vote 1 or 2 or 3, that will give them a bit more confidence in discussing why. Calabrese...
Continue...How to Create the Perfect Meeting Agenda - Steven G. Rogelberg, HBR The title oversells the blogpost here, but Rogelberg suggests one useful and relatively easy thing to do to improve agendas, and it ties into one of bullet points from above about covering the goal of the discussion clearly. The article suggests that instead of having vague agenda items like “Revisiting performance of data ingest module” or “New system uptime” they should instead be clear, focussed questions “What changes could drop data ingest times...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Remote brainstorming for regular humans - Bartek Ciszkowski Whiteboarding and brainstorming are harder to do when the team is distributed. Here are some suggestions for Ciszkowski on how to do distributed brainstorming: Do it in ~20 minute chunks with 5 minute breaks Use a simple white boarding tool (Ciszkowski suggests excalidraw which I hadn’t seen before) or even just a screenshared google doc to record responses. That way people can visualize connections between ideas to trigger new ideas. Periodically restate to your objectives to keep...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other |
Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software - Gergely Orosz Proposals and Braintrusts - Nathan Broslawsky These two articles both describe approaches to usefully open up architectural or other proposals to input from a group. The first, an “Architecture Jam”, is sort of half-brainstorming, half-architectural white boarding session; it can work remotely, but is definitely synchronous. The second is more asynchronous - writing up a proposal, and sending it off to a group of people whose job is, explicitly, to improve the proposal. Either...
Continue...Snowflake retros - Mike Crittenden While retrospective meetings are useful for all kinds of research computing work, software development is main area where retros happen so often and regularly that they can start to get stale. Crittenden suggests avoiding that by making each one unique - setting up a rotation of both the person who runs the retro and the format of the retro (there’s a link to 10 different retro formats) to have them regularly changed up. As a postscript - I can not...
Continue...Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science of Workplace Meetings - Joseph E. Mroz, Joseph A. Allen, Dana C. Verhoeven, Marissa L. Shuffler, Current Directions in Psychological Science As a manager, one of our responsibilities is to keep people aligned and disseminate information. One (one!) tool available to us are meetings, which can be extremely efficient when run well and continually improved; but ugh, how many meetings have we gone to that aren’t that way? We actually know a lot about meetings, what works...
Continue...How to have meetings that don’t suck (as much) - Danielle Leong More and more collaboration occurs asynchronously these days, but meetings are vital for coordinating that collaboration. Meetings are also routinely done really poorly, and academia is (or should be) famous for how poorly they’re done. Whether we’re having a meeting to make a decision, solve a problem, gather input, share information, or point everyone in the same direction, Leong calls out some things that should be crystal clear: Who is leading this meeting?...
Continue...Good Meetings - Sara Drasner The purpose of the meeting is clear There’s an agenda (we’ll dive in to the complexity of this in a moment) There are the right people in the room. Not too many where communication is overly complicated, not too few where the people you need to move forward aren’t there. There’s some order. People aren’t dropping in and out, talking over each other, or being generally inconsiderate There’s a clear decision, outcome, and next steps at the end Some points...
Continue...Stand-up Meetings are Dead (and what to do instead) - Ben Darfler, Honeycomb Blog What if daily standups, but for an hour? Darfler describes how Honeycomb has switched their standups - from the usual short round-table format to a daily hour long gathering (a “meandering team sync”) that includes social time, and then a collaboratively-edited catch all agenda of work items. Rather than being formulaic, it becomes the standard place for team-wide discussions (technical or process) and also explicitly includes a social component. Darfler finds...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other |
A guide to quarterly planning (plus a template) - Nicole Kahansky, Hypercontext Kahansky gives an outline for a quarterly planning meeting. Quarterly is an excellent cadence for planning (and even performance reviews) for a lot of research computing teams; long enough between meetings that meaningful amounts of work can be done, but short enough to be able to react to our always-changing environment and needs. Kahansky outlines a five-point agenda: Retrospective on last quarter Brainstorm on what could be done to make a significant difference...
Continue...14 strategies to shorten lengthy meetings - Hanna Ross, Fellow.app It’s been a little while since we’ve had a good meeting article in the roundup. This one covers some ground we’ve seen before, but meeting management is so fundamental that it’s always worth reviewing. Ross’s points, slightly trimmed for length: Have a clear purpose and agenda for the meeting in advance, and send background materials - can’t emphasize this enough. Agendas and materials are important, but without an underlying purpose, you have no way to...
Continue...How to refactor meetings as they grow with the rule of eight - Jade Rubik Rubik shares a guideline — a meeting with more than eight people isn’t effective as a decision-making meeting, and so: When you have more than eight participants, you either need to change the format of the meeting, or you need to restructure the participants (and you usually want to do some deeper work on communication and organizational structure). There are some good examples of redesigning meetings, either shifting their focus...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events |
How to Run an Organized Town Hall Meeting - Alexandria Hewko, Fellow Town Halls are a pretty common format in our discipline, and… they’re often not great. They’re ad-hoc, mostly prepared talks, and so generally not super well-received (and, thus, not generally well-attended). Why bother if you can read the slides and the Q&A afterwards, right? We’re all busy. Hewko gives some advice for running a town hall which is actually a community event rather than a broadcast from HQ: Have a recurring meeting cadence...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other |
How to run a Retrospective - Chase Seibert Siebert writes this in the context of sprints, but this short and solid how-to for running retrospectives applies to any project. (A sprint is just a a mini-project, after all - it has well-defined objectives, along with a beginning, middle, and end). Siebert probably feels that actually following up on the retrospective is out of scope of an article on how to run the retrospective meeting, which is fair. Don’t take that as a sign that the...
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