jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Strategy
Other tags: | 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...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...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...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: | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
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...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Technical Leadership: Other |
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...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...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...