jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Strategy
Other tags: | Strategy: Risk 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: | Working With A Research Community: Digital Humanities |
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: | 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: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other |
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: | Technical Leadership: Other |
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 |
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: Research to Development Maturity Ladder |
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: | 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: | 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...Other tags: | 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: | Technical Leadership: Other |
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...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: | 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: | 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...Other tags: | 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...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...
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