jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
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Subcategories: Advocacy Resources, Alignment, Change Management, Funding, Making Decisions, Managing Up, Marketing, Other, Prioritization, Product/Service Management, Project Management, Research to Development Maturity Ladder, Risk Management, Working across an organization, Working with Decision Makers, Working with Stakeholders, Working with other vendors
Why Minimize Management Decision Time - Johanna Rothman I’ve mentioned before that my wife, trained as an emergency-room nurse, and myself, trained as an academic, have very different default approaches to decision making under uncertainty. I fall more under the “I’ll just do a quick literature review and read these two books first” school. She has what Google calls “a bias towards action”. Both are perfectly good approaches in the right context. Unfortunately, as a manger, my default stretching out of decision making - and...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Strategy: Prioritization |
Scaling yourself as an engineering manager - Sally Lait When our responsibilities grow, we need to grow too. That means focussing on the truly important, not doing the things that simply don’t make the cut of the priority list, getting the help you need. Not discussed in this article, though it’s at least as important, is delegating tasks and efforts you know how to do well and were doing previously to your team members, helping them grow as well. This article also gives some time...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
Own Your Feedback (Part 1): Receive Better Feedback by Asking - Padmini Pyapali We’ve talked about giving feedback to our team members, but we need feedback, too - from our managers, or researcher’s we’re supporting, or other stakeholders. Pyapali makes some specific recommendations for getting good feedback from others. They all involve asking, and how to ask: Be Timely and Specific - you’ll get better feedback if you’re asking soon after the thing you’re asking about, and if you ask specific questions Provide a Reason...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Strategy: Prioritization |
How to say “No” right now - Lara Hogan, Wherewithall The year end is approaching, and with it deadlines and final pushes. But other stuff comes up. The solution to dealing with too much work isn’t “time management” - managing time isn’t a power granted to us. There’s only task management, and the number one task management skill is declining them. This is a good time of year to practice saying no or deferring a yes - everyone’s in the same boat and so understands....
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
5 Tips for Saying No To Stakeholders - Roman Pichler You can’t keep focus on your goals and priorities without saying no to requests. We’ve covered articles on this in the roundup before, and alluded to this in the stopping things advice at the beggining of the newsletter, but it’s an important topic! Pichler emphasizes: Don’t feel bad about saying No Empathize with the stakeholder Reframe the conversation - around the problem to solve and the project goals Don’t rush the decision (but don’t procrastinate...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
Templates for Writing a Better Board Report! - Dolph Ward Goldenburg Research computing leadership can and should learn a lot from nonprofit leadership. Research computing grant-writing is are more like writing for nonprofit grants than it is for research grants (remind me to write this blog post some day). Managing open-source contributions is exactly managing volunteers. Stakeholder management, community outreach… there’s a lot of overlap. This particular blog post won’t be relevant to all research computing managers. Some of us have mangers who are themselves...
Continue...Five Questions that Will Help You Strengthen as a Decision-Maker - Art Petty Tweet: “Every time I make myself write out…” - Cindy Alvarez As managers, making decisions is a pretty big part of the job - priorities for the team, criteria the next new hire, etc. It pays to spend a little time structuring our thoughts around decisions, whether they are decisions we’re making completely by ourselves, or decisions the team is making together. Petty has five questions he suggests we use to guide...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Alignment | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Managing A Team: Other |
A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable - Dave Bailey A lot of research computing team managers - especially those of us who came up through the research side - aren’t great at holding the team accountable. It’s pretty easy to understand why - the whole idea of being accountable for timeline and scope is a bit of an awkward fit to that world. Something took longer than expected, or someone took a different tack than they had committed to earlier? I mean, it’s...
Continue...How to Give Difficult Feedback to Your Boss (Even When You’re Scared) - Karen Hurt, Let’s Grow Leaders Giving negative feedback to your team members takes some courage the first times you do it as a new manager; when you’re providing feedback to your own manager that’s a whole other level. Here Hurt provides some steps for how to proceed (paraphrased) Be clear up-front about your intent and goal, and how you’ll communicate Set up a time to talk in a private place Be objective...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Strategy: Managing Up |
Managers should ask for feedback - CJ Cenizal Cenizal makes what should be an uncontroversial - but relatively uncommonly followed - point that managers should be routinely asking for input on their own behaviours and leadership from their team members. This is much more easily done if there are routine one-on-ones, if the ask for input is also routine (not necessarily every one-on-one, but frequent), and the manager has a habit of demonstrating that they take such input seriously and are comfortable talking about their...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Strategy: Alignment |
Don’t Assume Consensus In The Absence of Objection - Candost Dagdeviren Most people don’t like the conflict that comes with disagreement, and people especially don’t like disagreeing with their boss. Not hearing objections, particularly objections to something you’ve said, does not mean there’s no disagreement. It just means there’s no voiced disagreement. So as Dagdeviren points out, you have to go out of your way to elicit disagreement. “What are things that could go wrong with this approach”, “what things does this miss”, “what are...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Managing Up | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Minto Pyramid - Adam Amran, Untools Amran gives a very clear formula here for emails that you also see in advice for briefing boards (or in our case, e.g., scientific advisory committee.). Start with a one-sentence paragraph of the conclusion (or the ask); then a listing of the key arguments; then the supporting details. I’d add that the subject line should reflect the conclusion/ask. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I’m generally ok about writing to-the-point, skimmable emails. But that skill may have...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Managing Up | Managing Your Career: Other |
Get More Feedback This Week - Laura Tacho Specific guidance along the lines of what we discussed last week about getting more feedback: Be specific - ask for super-specific feedback/advice/guidance Be timely - ask for it immediately after what you want input on, or even before Be gracious - reward the behaviour you want to see more of! Thanking them, taking the input seriously, and even letting them know later how you incorporated the input makes it more likely you’ll get good feedback in the...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working across an organization | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Working With A Research Community: Digital Humanities |
Organic and Locally Sourced: Growing a Digital Humanities Lab with an Eye Towards Sustainability - Rebekah Cummings, David S. Roh, Elizabeth Callaway, Digital Humanities Quarterly A useful article on setting up a Digital Humanities “pop up” lab in the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, after an earlier attempt had failed. The story told here of learning from (and building on) previous attempts and using the lab not simply at a thing in and of itself but as a concrete thing for a nascent cross-campus effort...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Meetings | 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...Other tags: | Strategy: Risk Management | Strategy: Project Management |
What Is & How To Create A Risk Management Plan - Emily Luijbregts, Digital Project Manager Most of us in research probably started off on fairly small and well-scoped projects where risk management wasn’t a significant factor; or the risks were well-understood enough that everyone knew how to deal with them so there wasn’t a need to separately track and manage the risks. If you get involved with larger and longer projects, though, especially ones that bring together a number of skills, it may be...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Strategy: Marketing |
Blogging your research: Tips for getting started - Alice Fleerackers, ScholCommBlog Fleerackers’ post is aimed at researchers but works equally well for us in research computing. It starts off with an important point - not every blog post needs to be a 1500 word feature. It could be a summary of a paper or conference session, a Q&A/interview post; anything that makes the audience more informed about your groups work than it was before. The decision for where to blog is normally easier for our...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Digital Humanities | Strategy: Project Management |
Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook - Beth Fischer and Hannah Jacob, Wired!, Duke University Fischer and Jacob are starting off on what looks like a really exciting project, assembling a handbook for starting digital projects in the humanities. It will be interesting to what comes of this effort - and if your team has helped support such a project, they’re seeking contributions.
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Marketing |
Newcastle University Research Software Engineering 2020 (PDF) - Newcastle Research Software Group BEAR - Advanced Research Computing Research Software Group 2020 Report (PDF) - Birmingham Research Software Group These two reports on the 2020 activities of the research software development groups at Newcastle and Birmingham are extremely interesting if you run a research software development core facility-type operation, and very interesting even if you don’t int terms of the clear product and strategy mindset (and communications efforts) behind the groups. In Newcastle’s, we get some...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Change Management | Strategy: Alignment |
Mailbag: Building alignment around a new strategy - Will Larson This was written in the context of setting a technical strategy within a technical organization, but it works just as well in a context where you’re working with stakeholders and researchers about a product or project strategy. The approach Larson describes will be familiar from the discussion about “change management” and stopping doing things in #58 - there’s no way around it, it’s labour- and time-consuming. You have to first make sure everyone agrees on...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Data Teams | Strategy: Working across an organization | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Ten simple rules for starting (and sustaining) an academic data science initiative - Micaela S. Parker, Arlyn E. Burgess, Philip E. Bourne, PLOS Computational Biology Many research computing centres are trying to figure out how to launch or scale up a data science core facility or research institute. Creating anything new within an organization is a challenge, even when the winds are in your favour. Parker, Burgess, and Bourne offer some very sage advice on not just starting up a data science effort in particular,...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Strategy: Working across an organization |
9 Tips for Effectively Sharing Peer Feedback in the Workplace - Mara Carvello Worth comparing this to what we discussed earlier on feedback. Carvello councils use of on-judgmental language, and focus on the problem not the individual; those are consistent with talking about behaviour and impact. Be prepared to have a conversation - makes sense when talking with peers. We’ve talked in other issues about how the “feedback sandwich” approach is known not to work; the way to “cushion” negative feedback with positive feedback isn’t...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Strategy: Risk Management |
Pre-Mortem: Working Backwards in Software Design - Seema Thapar, PayPal We haven’t talked about premortems (#12, #43) in a while. If you don’t recall, the process - sometimes part of a project kickoff - is to have a well-posed project and then to ask the team to imagine that it’s finished, and it has failed. What has gone wrong? Thapar gives us a particularly nice overview the why of premortems here, and describes how they’re run at PayPal. They start with a 1-pager describing the...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Alignment |
That Burning Feeling When You’re Right - Roy Rapoport Rapoport reminds us that being right is nothing. Seeing the correct path to take is table stakes. If you can’t convince others to join you on that path, nothing will get accomplished.
Continue...Coordination models - tools for getting groups to work well together - Jade Rubick Rubick is slowly writing a pretty impressive compendium of coordination models within but also across that he’s seen work, how to make them work, and their tradeoffs. Several of them are extremely relevant to research computing and data; Service provider Consultant (not yet written) Liaison Embedded Community of practice There was a lot of discussion early on in the newsletter about centralized vs embedded RSE or data science teams; it’s nice...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Making Decisions | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Managing A Team: Other |
The Decision-Making Pendulum - Candost Dagdeviren Our Role in Effective Decision Making - Kathy Keating Everyday Decisions, Done Dirt Cheap - Matt Schellhas Dagdeviren talks about the decision-making pendulum, the spectrum of decision-making processes ranging from authority (“Because I said so”), through advice and consent, to consensus decision making (“So say we all”). The processes at the extremes aren’t great for either the teams or the decisions that likely result (I don’t agree with everything Manager-Tools says, but I think they’re 100% right about consensus...
Continue...Unstuck yourself from the ideas that go nowhere - Candost Dagdeviren Falsify yourself - Jonas Lundberg It’s really, really hard to let go of an idea you came up with. We built the entire scientific method around that fact! And so outside of science and the rigour of hypothesis testing and unfriendly reviewers, it’s too easy to cling to ideas that clearly aren’t going anywhere. This is especially true in people or project management, where you lack the immediate feedback that comes with doing hands-on...
Continue...Managing Your Manager - Brie Wolfson Back in #95 we had an article by Roy Rapoport about manager “guard rails”, introducing us to the idea that there are spectra people tend to fall on when they are leading, like “freedom vs guidance” or “caution vs speed”. There’s no intrinsically bad side to either end of those spectra, although they can be better suited for some environments than others (nuclear plant safety equipment manufactures tend to avoid “move quick and break things” sorts of leaders in...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Funding |
Don’t fund Software that doesn’t exist This blog post by Andraeas Müller connects two facts that I think most of us in R&D computing are pretty familiar with - one that we talk a lot about and one that we don’t - and extrapolates to a conclusion that I’m not sure I agree with but is certainly worth discussing. The fact that we talk about regularly is that ongoing maintenance of important research software (and key open-source software in general) is famously underfunded, and this...
Continue...One of the big differences between research computing and regular software development or IT has always been the open-endedness of the work, and in particular that we’re often starting in a “will this even work” mode rather than building something we know is doable and it’s just a matter of discovering and validating the user requirements (something that Agile approaches help a lot with.) There was an interesting blurb in R&D Today abut the Manhattan project as an example of a project where everything was...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Data Resources | Strategy: Advocacy Resources |
The ELIXIR Core Data Resources: fundamental infrastructure for the life sciences, the ELIXIR team Funding of research computing and data resources is hard. As was pointed out in a recent blogpost at US-RSE, research infrastructure is generally funded as a project, which ends (“and they all lived happily ever after”), rather than as a product which continues to be used; “sustainability” is a word that comes up very quickly in research computing conversations. This is a good paper that makes a familiar case for funding...
Continue...The Happiness and Stresses of Open Source work - Drew Devault My FOSS story - Andrew Gallant Research computing teams have a lot in common with open source communities - even if you aren’t developers or developing open source software. One of the joys of open source communities is that you’re part of a small, visible team solving problems for your users - and that’s exactly the situation we’re in. But there’s downsides to that, too. Users can be incredibly demanding, and when you’re a...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
6 Tips on How to Say No To Customers - Sharon Moorhouse, Intercom We work closely with researchers, and that can make it hard to say no to a feature request. This article walks through the process, which is normally pretty routine but can run the risk of leaving hurt feelings. The tips most relevant to us are: Explain why Involve the (researcher) in finding another solution Focus on the job to be done, not the `no’ Understand both sides It’s ok to lose a...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Research to Development Maturity Ladder |
Source Code has a Brief and Lonely Existence - Derek Jones Derek Jones has an interesting blog where he takes data-driven looks at software and software development. Here he points out: The majority of source code has a short lifespan (i.e., a few years), and is only ever modified by one person (i.e., 60%). I think this is worth coming to terms with, particularly in terms of research computing and tool maturity. Most new ideas, as they get put into code, will stall out at...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Strategy: Project Management |
Premortems: The solution to the Preventable Problems Paradox - Shreyas Doshi on Twitter This is a great twitter thread, which I assume is a summary of one of the author’s presentations, giving very specific advice on how to run a pre-mortem before starting a project to identify potential issues before they arise. It’s so easy for people to see potential issues and not say anything; it could be because they’re not comfortable speaking up, but it could just as easily be because they assume someone...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity | Strategy: Prioritization |
Too Many Things - Sven Amann As research computing team members and managers, we all have way too many things on our plate, and the battle to being productive and effective is focussing relentlessly on our priorities and letting less important tasks slide. I actually generally do a pretty decent job of that - except when workloads peak and I’m much busier than normal, which is of course exactly when I need to be best at focussing on the priorities. In this blog post, Sven...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Project Management |
Get unstuck on your infrastructure choices - Fred Ross A good reminder that there are a lot of perfectly good technical solutions out there and worrying about which one is “the best” probably isn’t worth your time: Decide based on the following criteria: Has your company already standardized on one of these? Use what they do. Do you already have experience on one of them? Use what you know. Do you have a friend or colleague that knows one of them and who will help...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Systems: Incident Handling | Strategy: Project Management |
5 Best Practices on Nailing Postmortems - Hannah Culver, Blameless We’ve started doing incident reports - sort of baby postmortems - in our project, which has been an extremely useful practice in growing more discipline about how issues with availability or security are reported, distributed, and dealt with. It also gives us a library of materials that we can look through to identify any patterns that appear. This article talks about some best practices for running postmortem processes – Use visuals Be a historian -...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Operational and Fiscal Management of Core Facilities: A Survey of Chief Research Officers - Carter et al. A lot of people who work in research are unaware of the fact that there’s a lot of research about research, how it’s done, how it’s funded, what seems to work and what doesn’t. A lot of that research is necessarily qualitative, not quantitative, which initially seems wishy-washy to STEM-trained folks, but those methods can be just as rigorous and are solid practice for getting insight into most...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Technical Leadership: HPC | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
Building a Shared Resource HPC Center Across University Schools and Institutes: A Case Study - MacLachlan et al. Here the authors describe the history of an HPC centre at George Washington University; it’s interesting to read this in the light of the broader study above. We see some of the same themes; “The budget did not include operating budget line items for staff and operating expenses in the initial budget” and yet “New staff resources was one of the most critical success factors as well...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Other | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
Meet the Research Impact Canvas - Benedikt Fecher and Christian Kobsda One vital but underlooked piece of managing technical work like research computing efforts is making sure we’re providing as much utility to our organization or research community as possible. In the business and especially startup world there’s the “business model canvas”, a framework for writing out and thinking through how you would sustainably “provide value” for customers — in this article, Fecher and Kobsda present one for research efforts. What are the things you...
Continue...Driving Change: Why Are Your Ideas Being Rejected? - Bartosz Many of us have highly technical training and so we’re always looking for things to optimize; when we move into working with lots of people we keep doing that, and initially we often find it mystifying that our suggestions for doing something in a clearly better way get turned down! But change involving people is a lot of work, so change takes a lot of buy in. And people systems are and high-dimensional, so local...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Strategy: Other |
Research Computing and Data Capabilities: A Tool for Assessment and Improvement - Data Brunson, Claire Mizumoto, Patrick Shmitz, EDUCAUSE This is really important and relevant work that I was pointed to by a long-time reader; I hadn’t even known this work was going on. A working group between EDUCAUSE, Internet2, and the Campus Research Computing Consortium has put together a very detailed capability model of research computing in research institutions. The model is clearly of an HPC-type centre at a university, but I think the...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Success Factors in R&D Leadership - Gritzo, Fusfeld, & Carpenter, Research-Technology Management This is a paper from a few years ago which took a look at leadership development data from 47,000 respondents; both managers and those evaluating them, in R&D and outside of R&D, and compared the two. They found - well, it’s hard to read it any other way than R&D managers were generally worse managers than non-R&D managers: When the results were consolidated, R&D managers were rated more favorably than their non-R&D counterparts...
Continue...Attitudes toward Change and Transformational Leadership: A Longitudinal Study - Matthew David Henricks, Michael Young & E. James Kehoe, J. Change Management There’s a lot of people who spend their careers studying how workplaces work. I don’t think most of the management literature percolates into STEM fields — the papers look funny. They’re full of impenetrable jargon (unlike our normal completely buzzword-free reading) and the text seems impossibly fluffy compared to dense STEM work (but, well, people’s behaviour doesn’t lend itself to formulae and small...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
Time management when everything’s a priority - Elizabeth Harrin, Girl’s Guide to PM Most of these items are things you will have seen before, but even pros routinely practice the basics: Schedule Your Time Know the Difference Between Urgent and Important Understand Your Priorities Delegate and Help Plan at Different Levels Know When You are Most Productive Deal With Email Integrate Your Schedules Deal With Conflicts Stay Positive I recently tackled two things on this list. I started blocking off my schedule for tasks that...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
Product for Internal Platforms - Camille Fournier This is an article written for tech companies about how easy it is to go off the rails developing the enterally-used tech platform for developers. It holds a lot of lessons for research computing (software, systems, or data) though. The traps you can fall into are the same, because you are developing tools for a small, captive audience. It’s too easy to lose track of what a broad range of “customers” need to succeed: When platform teams build...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Strategy: Research to Development Maturity Ladder |
New users generate more exceptions than existing users (in one dataset - Derek Jones, The Shape Of Code Not surprising for us in research computing but nice to have it validated with data: new users of software find new ways to trigger software faults. This is one of the reasons why the transitions that research software goes through — from being used by the creator to being used by friendly users, and then again to being used by a wider community — is so challenging...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Advocacy Resources |
Evidence for the importance of research software - Michelle Barker, Daniel S. Katz, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran A nice list of papers, talks, and other resources on the topic of the impact of research software. There’s also a continually updated Zotero group library and Github repository.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Email Etiquette: How to Ask People for Things and Actually Get a Response - Jocelyn Glei As you move up in research computing (or anywhere really) you start communicating more, especially upwards, with people whose attention is torn between more and more things. That means for your emails to work you have to make them increasingly self-contained but also concise. There’s 9 points here but four of them are key tools in my kit: Lead with the ask - You’re sending this email to achieve...
Continue...Agile or Waterfall; a risk management perspective - Alfredo Motta There’s been lots written about agile vs waterfall, and most of us operate so much in an agile mode that we don’t really think about it any more, but I think Motta’s article is a very clear description of the what and why of the two approaches, and a good reminder that there are absolutely places in research computing where waterfall is the right choice. The Chaotic/Complex/Complicted/Obvious distinction is useful: The path is… There are...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Data Teams | Managing A Team: Team organization | Strategy: Working across an organization |
Collaborating on Research Data Support - Christina Maimone This is a short and useful “what worked well/what was challenging” overview of three initiatives at Northwestern where Research Computing and the Libraries collaborated on research data support. Both entities have a lot of experience and a lot of resources around research data management, and have greater or lesser amounts of reach with different parts of the University community. Even though your research computing team and your library may be quite different, I think there’ll be a...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Research to Development Maturity Ladder | Technical Leadership: Testing |
Testing And Scale - Daniel Bell This is a short read talking about the difference in the need for testing at the initial, exploratory phase of coding (where detailed testing is brittle and slows you down) as opposed to the stage of development where the code is being used for real things (where lack of detailed coding makes the codebase brittle because it can’t be easily safely modified). This this is particularly relevant to research software development, where I’ve argued a maturity model is a...
Continue...Building digital workforce capacity and skills for data-intensive science - OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers This white paper takes a careful look at to what the workforce needs will be to enable data-intensive science in both the public and private sectors. They take a close look at 13 case studies, and it’s worth reading if you’re interested - it’s only about 40 pages. Maybe most crucially, a key take-away of the report is: There is a need for both digitally skilled researchers [..]...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Strategy: Prioritization |
A simple framework for software engineering management - Andrei Gridnev This post describes a nice simple approach to structuring thinking about software development management; three categories of responsibilities People management - hiring, team member career development, ensuring people are content and engaged with their work Delivery leadership - execution on delivering new work or changes Technical system ownership - maintaining the technical systems under your stewardship and then labelling priority areas under each responsibility with issues - things that need to be changed ok -...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Bucketing your time - James Stanier, The Engineering Manager We’ve talked about organizing tasks in buckets before - In Issue 37 I’ve mentioned my experiments with trello, and in Issue 39 I linked to an article about having a “dashboard” that covers both issues, things to keep an eye on, and future-looking work. This is a nice article about why I find these approaches work well for me - it’s a way of systematizing the discipline of not just getting lost in the day-to-day while...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Technical Leadership: Other |
Use a Pre-Mortem to Identify Project Risks Before They Occur - Mike Cohn We’ve talked a lot about the importance of psychological safety in teams - making team members comfortable expressing their opinions, including raising issues. Without that, you’re missing important input and potentially running into foreseeable (and foreseen!) problems. Premortems give explicit encouragement to raise issues. I’ve used these to good effect in some project-kickoff situations - trying to get the team to see obstacles ahead so they can be avoided. With pre-mortems, one...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Technical Leadership: Software Development |
A Software Development Life Cycle for Research Software Engineering - Kings Digital Lab There was a really interesting SORSE talk this past week, Digital Humanities RSE: King’s Digital Lab as experiment and lifecycle by James Smithies and Arianna Ciula. The Digital lab, which hosts and maintains 160+ digital humanities projects, has a very nice lifecycle model for the research software development/hosting/maintenance efforts they get involved in, and they’ve generously made it, and templates for the documents at every step along the cycle, available to the...
Continue...The How (and Why) of User Flows - Learn UXD This is a good short introduction to how to plan or document user flows. The context of the article is doing it for web or mobile applications, but really it can be applied to any process a user has to go through (often then called “service design”). I’m putting this in “Research Computing Systems” because I think in research software development or data management, the research computing teams are generally pretty decent at imagining themselves...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Prioritization |
Limiting Work In Progress - Daniel Truemper A trap research computing managers fall into fairly frequently (including me) is seeing the big picture, seeing all the things that need to get done, and trying to start them all at once. After all, we know about parallel computing, a wider pipeline can mean higher throughput, right? But human beings don’t work like that. You get more done by diligently limiting the amount of work in progress, which has the advantage that it requires prioritization.
Continue...Renegotiating your first vendor contract - Will Larson Eventually we all have to negotiate or renegotiate our first contract with vendors. This short article won’t give any secrets that will win you huge concessions. It will hopefully make the process less stressful by providing a game plan and by setting some realistic expectations, on their side (your vendor wants money, and is willing to make some small trades on the margins for the exact amount of money, but not much) and yours (you should absolutely...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Other |
Write Five, Then Synthesize: Good Engineering Strategy Is Boring - Will Larson Focus enable strategy - not only what you’ll be doing, but how you’ll be doing it. Developing a software development strategy for a team allows you to focus on the important parts of each project rather than bikeshedding the same decisions again and again. You can’t develop such a strategy for executing projects if each project is completely different. Larson’s article is an argument in favour of grounding such a strategy in the...
Continue...How to deprioritize tasks, projects, and plans (without feeling like you’re ‘throwing away’ your time and effort) - Jory MacKay, RescueTime Focus is all about not doing things - which is tough in a research environment when there are so many interesting and valuable things that you could be doing! MacKay’s article summarizes some good strategies for not doing the right things. Timeboxing - Set limits on how long you’ll work on a task Create a ‘not to do’ list Use a weekly review to...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Technical Leadership: Other |
The 10 Attitudes of Outstanding Product Owners - David Pereira Tactfully rejecting feature requests - Andrew Quan Because of the funding structure of research our training has taught us to think in terms of projects, but in research computing we’re mainly managing products - long lived things that other people use, and don’t typically have clear start or end dates. That means thinking in terms of differentiation, strategy, speeding the learning process, priorities, and alignment, rather than or at least in addition to thinking of...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Systems: Other | Strategy: Advocacy Resources |
The Case for ‘Center Class’ HPC: Think Tank Calls for $10B Fed Funding over Five Years For those who haven’t seen the Centre for Data Innovation’s report advocating tripling NSF’s funding for university HPC centres, the report and the arguments therein may be useful for your own internal advocacy efforts.
Continue...Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools - Zachary Weinberg Another very transparent product-focused assessment; a simple but thorough SWOT analyses of the current GNU Autotools stack, which hasn’t been updated in some time (which itself makes the updates harder since the entire process is “rusty”), and which has enormous legacy baggage, but still has opportunities.
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Technical Leadership: Other |
Creating a Risk-Adjusted Backlog - Mike Griffiths Here’s an example of a concept that I think research software development teams probably “get”, if implicitly, more than teams in other environments. Research software development spends much more time further down the technology readiness ladder; we spend a lot more time asking the question “can this even work” than we do “when will this feature ship”. The risks are higher, because most promising research ideas simply don’t pan out. So we spend a lot of time prototyping,...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Strategy: Marketing | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
If you build it, promote it, and they trust you, then they will come: Diffusion strategies for science gateways and cyberinfrastructure adoption to harness big data in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) community - Kerk F. Kee, Bethanie Le, Kulsawasd Jitkajornwanich Software packages, like ideas, don’t in fact speak for themselves. Getting any sizeable number of people to adopt a new idea, new practice, or new tool requires enormous amount of coordinated communication effort. In this paper, Kee, Le, and Jitkajornwanich describe what...
Continue...Leading your engineering team with ‘experiments’ not ‘processes’ - Cate Huston, LeadDev One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is that those of us who have worked in research for a while have at our disposal the advanced skills needed to manage teams and projects to support research, but that no one taught us the basics. Sometimes, the basics just mean applying the same rigor and processes to our new work that we did in our old: lab notebooks become one-on-one notes; thinking about...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Project Management |
Estimating your way to success - Rod Begbie, LeadDev Estimating gets a bad rep because our estimates… aren’t very good. The future isn’t knowable! But Begbie reminds us that the purpose of estimation isn’t to get perfect duration predictions but to structure initial conversations about what is to be done and what needs to be done to get there; and then to learn from the estimates to do better the next time. Begbie’s estimation rules are to keep tasks estimated duration between a half and...
Continue...Research: How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects - Ronald Klingebiel, HBR As we talked about at the start of the year, it’s hard to stop doing things, even when they don’t make sense any more. As Klingebiel reports, even big companies with well-established stage gate processes for advancing projects are tempted to fudge the requirements to let struggling projects advance and take up more resources - especially when the requirements that are struggling are (the more important!) external user requirements which are about...
Continue...Dirty Escalations: Making Frenemies and Pissing Off People - Chase Seibert So Manager-Tools would tell us, correctly, that escalation is a very broad term that means any kind of communication of increased urgency/importance - bringing a due-date of a deliverable earlier, going from an email to a phone call or a quick video chat, etc. That is all true, and “escalation” is also widely used to mean specifically raising an issue up the organizational ladder, and until we have a term specifically for that kind...
Continue...RSE Administration Tool - RSE-Sheffield The Research Software Engineering Sheffield team has released their project management and time tracking tool, RSEAdmin - documentation can be read here, and there’s a test instance running you can log in to. It tracks proposed projects through acceptance and funding stages, then tracks staff time on the projects.
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Strategy: Change Management |
Prattfalls: Better Communication - Roy Rapoport The Art of the Tick Tock - Lara Hogan, Wherewithall It’s too easy for us as manager to say things to a team member one-on-one or to the team as a group and for it to seemingly not register, or for it to be understood in a different way we intended. Rapoport has a useful model for those of us in tech of how to think about these misfires. In Rapoport’s model, the purpose of communication is to successfully...
Continue...Time Management Won’t Save You - Dane Jensen, HBR Just a reminder that time management will help you be more efficient at getting discrete tasks done, which is all well and good, but that’s far less important than being discerning about what you choose to do.
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Technical Leadership: Other |
Guiding critical projects without micromanaging - Camille Fournier However, as a senior manager, at some point you can make it harder for your managers to succeed when you give them very little structure to work with. It’s tempting to say “I don’t care how you do any of it as long as it gets done.” But that doesn’t help people figure out what is important to you, so they have to guess at what they share, when, and how. It’s tough to strike a balance...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Technical Leadership: Other |
Focus: assign multiple engineers to the same task - Dawid Ciężarkiewicz We’ve talked here quite a bit - starting way back in #13 - about pull requests as asynchronous pair programming, and the benefits of pair programming - not merely for quality control but for knowledge sharing in both directions. In this thought-provoking article, Ciężarkiewicz argues in favour of routinely having two (or more!) team members assigned to a task, so that rather than a code review at the back - or even before pair...
Continue...4 Practical Steps For Strategic Planning As A Leader - Anthony Boyd One hard things for new leaders to really come to terms with is that they typically have a lot more freedom in what their team does and how their team does it than might be comfortable. Defining a strategy for how to do whatever your team is charged with doing is a big responsibility. And it’s a lot scarier than staying focused on the day-to-day of routine work. As a result, I see...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Change Management |
The culture of process - Cate Huston The defining transition between hobbyist and professional, between someone in research who codes a little or does a bit of sysadminning and running a professional team providing research computing and data services, is that you no longer just focus on mean quality but also variance. You’re no longer trying to just get good results, but consistently good results. That means, painful though it might be, introducing some process. Huston has a few ways to think about process as,...
Continue...Advancing the Workforce That Supports Computationally and Data Intensive Research - Patrick Schmitz, Scott Yockel, Claire Mizumoto, Thomas Cheatham, Dana Brunson, Computing in Science and Engineering In #79 we mentioned an NSF grant on Strategic Tools, Practices, and Professional Development for Advancing Research Computing and Data. In this paper, the investigators give a great overview of the need for research computing and data personnel, real professional development opportunities, the very different requirements from higher ed IT, and the need for a career ladder on the...
Continue...What needs to change? That’s easy. How and when is the hard part. - Nikhyl Singhal We’ve seen in the last 22 months that things can change very quickly when everyone agrees they need to change. Singhal talks about the preconditions for enacting change, such as when many of us went to remote work: Agreement on the problem that needs solving A collective sense of urgency Quick Wins Required resources to deliver change - Trust, Time, Team It’s necessary, but not enough that there’s widespread...
Continue...Why The Status Quo Is So Hard To Change In Engineering Teams - Antoine Boulanger Boulanger here points out a situation that is especially common in academia, with slow-growing teams where individual team members have long tenure. The issue is that a team gets so used to the way things are they don’t even see it any more, and forget that things don’t have to be this way. There can be a sort of learned helplessness to the procedural, technical, and complexity problems within an...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Managing Up |
Managing Up - Lessons From Scaling Teams at Credit Karma and Lyft - Matt Greenberg, Valerie Wagoner, Dor Levi, Anne Lewandowski Managing upwards isn’t that different from managing our own team members; and it’s very similar to managing relationships with peers and external stakeholders like collaborators, situations where we also lack the ability to be directive. Greenberg, Wagoner, Levi, and Lewandowski suggest focussing on three areas: Aligning your and their goals — making sure you understand their goals so can find areas that align; Developing...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Prioritization |
Your Calendar = Your Priorities - John Cutler Cutler points out that our scarcest resource is time. There’s a saying in policy circles “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your priorities/values are”; in research computing managerial work, where our budget is typically pretty constrained, it’s our time which reflects our implicit priorities. Those implicit priorities may not be what they should be! Looking at your calendar (and making sure your calendar reflects what you actually do - e.g. blocking off time for...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects - Jade Rubick Scatter-Gather - Tim Ottinger One recurring issue with research computing is that we typically get funded for projects, but we’re really building products — tools, outputs, and expertise that will (hopefully) outlast any particular project. For different reasons, Rubick strongly recommends that your team focusses on milestones rather than projects, but this change in focus can help be an intermediate stepping stone between project-based thinking and product-based thinking. He recommends defining progress in...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Project Management | Managing A Team: Data Teams |
Don’t Make Data Scientists Do Scrum - Sophia Yang, Towards Data Science On the one hand, research computing and data projects, especially the intermediate parts between “will this even work” and “put this into production”, often map pretty well to agile approaches - you can’t waterfall your way to research and discovery. On the other hand, both the most uncertain (“Will this approach even work?”) and the most certain (“Let’s install this new cluster”) components are awkward fits to most agile frameworks, even if in...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Other | Strategy: Prioritization |
How to Write a Strategy Statement Your Team Will Actually Remember - Michael Porter, Nobl Academy Saying “no” - Mike McQuaid Porter’s article highlights an idea that’s come up a few times in the roundup - a very clear way to write out priorities or strategy is to contrast two things, both positive, and explicitly say that your strategy values one over the other. It’s too easy to write out “motherhood and apple pie” strategies: “we value moving fast and solid code”. But those statements...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Strategy: Marketing |
Research Software Engineering to reduce the environmental impact of a long-running script - Univ of Bristol Advanced Computing Research Centre RSE Case Studies - N8CIR In research computing, too much of the work we do goes unsung. This is a problem for a number of reasons - institutional decision makers don’t see the impact of our work, and other researchers we could be working with don’t have a good sense of what we do. As with the technical areas of research computing, documentation is key!...
Continue...What is the cost of bioinformatics? A look at bioinformatics pricing and costs - Karl Sebby This article is important to ponder even if your team’s work falls completely outside of bioinformatics. Service delivery models gets very little discussion in our community despite its importance. That’s a shame! It’s a pretty key part of how we interact with research groups. The delivery model determines how easily communicated and sustainable providing the service is, even if there isn’t any kind of cost recovery. How the service...
Continue...Prioritization, multiple work streams, unplanned work. Oh my! - Leeor Engel Engineering managers: How to reduce drag on your team - Chris Fraser Research computing shares with smaller, newer organizations like startups a very dynamic set of demands, requirements, and work. This distinguishes both from work in teams at many large mature organizations or in IT shops. The dynamism makes prioritization and focus especially important. Engel describes some principles for managing work in such a dynamic environment: When everything is important than nothing is important...
Continue...Sustained software development, not number of citations or journal choice, is indicative of accurate bioinformatic software - Paul P. Gardner et al., Genome Biology The quote from the Results section sort of says it all: We find that software speed, author reputation, journal impact, number of citations and age are unreliable predictors of software accuracy. This is unfortunate because these are frequently cited reasons for selecting software tools. However, GitHub-derived statistics and high version numbers show that accurate bioinformatic software tools are generally the product...
Continue...What Does and Doesn’t Happen After You Specialize? - David Baker Research computing and data has a large consulting component, and for that part of the job we can learn a lot from other consultants. The basic job - understand some aspect of a client’s work, uncover their problems, connect their problem to our specific expertise, and help them construct a solution - is the same in any field. Consultants in other fields are much more successful when they specialize. As long-term readers will know,...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Strategy: Advocacy Resources |
Survey reveals 6000+ people develop and maintain vital research software for Australian research - Jo Savill, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Research Software Capability in Australia - Michelle Barker and Markus Buchhorn Interesting results from a late-2021 ARDC survey on research software capability, of 70 managers of Australian research computing and data groups. Results were scaled to try to give an estimate of all-of-Australia numbers. The article by Savill gives an overview, and the full report by Barker and Buchhorn is interesting reading. Some key...
Continue...Building a Backlog Your Team Will Love - Blurbs By Amy At my last job — and this was my fault — the backlog became an undifferentiated mass. We did keep higher priorities to the top, and lower priority items to the bottom. There was a lot there, though, some we were clearly never going to get to, and the tickets were of very different size… yeah, it wasn’t great. Here Amy outlines her teams workflow, and it looks pretty good: An inbox, called “Add...
Continue...Make changes easy for your team - Jade Rubick Miscommunication Plan - Aviv Ben-Yosef Rubick has a plan for making changes manageable for your team: Always be listening Keep a management backlog (!!) How to make a change: problem, diagnosis, remedy Socialize your plan Communicate the change As an experiment As reversible, if true Watch your iteration speed and Ben-Yosef emphasizes the importance of bookending the change with lots of communication, which too often we deeply specialized people tend to forget. “The old way was...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Working With A Research Community: Other |
How To Do Less - Alex Turek Four Steps to Organizational Change Without the Drama - Deiwin Sarjas Turek walks through the steps of digging yourself and your team out of a hole via absolutely ruthless prioritization - picking exactly one priority and only advancing that goal. That means advancing it either directly through work on the priority, or through making work more effective by changing how and what work is being done. The hardest part of doing this is the communications with others, and...
Continue...The Time Management Technique That Can Work For Anyone - Nir Eyal I’m in a new workplace, with a lot going on, and it is super easy to get distracted. Worse still, I can effortlessly justify to myself being distracted and flitting between different things. “I’m still learning the landscape; it’s important for someone in my role to have a broad view of what’s going on everywhere. Who knows what might come up in that conversation tomorrow?” That’s not even really wrong! But it’s far...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Working With A Research Community: Other |
ACI-REF Leading Practices of Facilitation - Advanced CyberInfrastructure - Research and Education Facilitators This is a document outlining what exactly a research computing and data facilitator does. The role gets called a lot of different things. A million years ago I was a “Technical Analyst”, one of the many completely opaque job titles we give ourselves in this line of work, but it was this role. When I took on this role, the centre was just starting up and we were trying to figure out...
Continue...Communication is not Collaboration - Matt Schellhas Schellhas decries the tendency to assume that if groups aren’t working together, it’s because of a lack of communication, and so the solution is some joint meeting to keep each other informed (this can go even worse, and become… shudder … joint social activities). But communicate is not collaboration, and so more communication doesn’t necessarily lead to more collaboration. To get two teams working together, Schellhas says, is not significantly different than getting one team working together: Build...
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