jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Strategy
Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other | 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 |
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...Other tags: | 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: Working across an organization | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | 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: | Managing A Team: Data Teams | Strategy: Working across an organization | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
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: | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
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: | 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: 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 |
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...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
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...Other tags: | 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...
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