jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Strategy
Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development |
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 |
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: | 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 |
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 |
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...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | 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: | Technical Leadership: Other |
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: 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...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 |
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: Open Source Management |
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 | 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 |
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...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other |
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: 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...Other tags: | 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...
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