jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Working With A Research Community
Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Managing Up | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
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: | Becoming A Manager: Meetings | Strategy: Alignment |
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: | Managing A Team: Other |
Creating a Slack Writing Etiquette Guide for Your Workplace - RC Victorino, Slab This is a great overview on using Slack well in a workspace. Like so much, whether the tool is used effectively or not comes down to setting clear expectations, and it’s our job as manager to set and communicate those expectations. The points the article makes strike me as dead on, although it took me a while to come to these realizations myself (in particular I hate hate hated Slack threads when...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Technical Leadership: Other |
Google’s Technical Writing Courses - Google Some of us, particularly those of us who were trained in engineering departments, got technical writing training — but most of us didn’t, and the training we did get was focussed more on reserach papers (which let’s face it is a terrible model for almost any other form of writing besides research papers). Google has made available two of their internal courses on technical writing. The first course is sort of “Strunk and White for people who work with...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Design Docs, Markdown, and Git - Caitie McCaffrey Azure Sphere Security Services used a Word/Sharepoint workflow for drafting, circulating, refining, and approving design documents wasn’t working, so they trialed a move to using markdown and git for their design documents. It was a success, and here they write up their approach. Not every design document corresponds to just on repository’s worth of code, so they chose to have one single repo for design documents for their organization organization, to support discoverability and large/unconstrained multi-codebase architectural...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
The New Science of Building Great Teams - Alex “Sandy” Pentland, HBR “Bursty” Communication Can Help Remote Teams Thrive Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley, Behavioural Scientist These two articles circulated independently this week, expressing related ideas about how communication works in high performing teams. The first emphasizes how communication works between team members. It’s worth reading, but two key points: Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet. Members connect directly with one another—not just with...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | 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...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
4 ways to improve your writing and communication in your free time - Jessica Thiefels Written communication is remote work super power - Snir David Asynchronous Communication Builds Respect and Trust - Dexter Sy, Tech Management Life A lot of us in research and computing ended up here because we preferred working in math or code over writing. But writing is an incredibly useful skill to hone — it helps us communicate with our team now, and with our stakeholders; and it helps develop our...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Drawing good architecture diagrams - Toby W, (UK) National Cyber Security Centre A nice overview of drawing architecture diagrams. The article makes the point that the diagram is about communicating, and if it doesn’t communicate the key points of the system to the readers, then it’s not succeeding. I like this advice: Start with a basic high level concept diagram which provides a summary. Then create separate diagrams that use different lenses to zoom into the various parts of your system. Having multiple diagrams of...
Continue...Asynchronous Meetings: Everything You Need to Know - Fellow App As we get more and more comfortable with distributed teams, there’s increasing interest in written asynchronous team communication. It has the advantage of retaining a record and allowing people to contribute on their own schedule. Some things are hard to do asynchronously - it’s hard to imagine an asynchronous one-on-one being successful - but some are quite easy like status updates. We know (from, for instance, open source) that complex decisions can be made with...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing Your Career: Other |
Writing Is One of the Best Things You Can Invest In, as a Software Engineer. The More Experienced People Become, the More They Tend to Realize This. - Gergely Ortoz Speaking of non-technical skills being underrepresented in technical job descriptions… Communicating well is absolutely essential part of a job in any interdisciplinary endeavour like research computing, and written communication is becoming absolutely vital as teams go remote. That doesn’t necessarily mean particularly good grammar or vocabulary - we’re an international community, many in our community...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Writing in the Sciences (Coursera Course) - Kristin Sainani Writing is one of those things that many of us got into science or computing to avoid. But written communication, especially to stakeholders and the public, is vital for effective product management in research computing. Sainani has what looks like a pretty good short course on writing for within research communities and to the public: Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, peer...
Continue...Other tags: | 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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Filtering your language as an engineering leader - Rob Begbie, LeadDev Borrowing Lines from Great Leaders Around You - Lara Hogan, LeadDev Everyone who’s managed or been a team lead for long enough has had the experience of thinking aloud or asking an idle question and then having a team member waste hours following up on what they thought was now a Suddenly Important Thing. As a manager we need to stay involved in the work enough to understand what issues are likely to come...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing A Team: Other | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Words Matter: Is Your Digital Communication Style Impacting Your Employees? - Samantha Rae Ayoub, Fellow “We need to talk”. “Fine.” These all messages or responses that would be very uncomfortable for us to receive from our boss; but when things are busy it’s pretty easy for us to communicate in exactly that way with our team members or peers. Your boss (probably) isn’t a jerk, and neither are you, but when we have a lot of things on our mind it’s easy to not pay...
Continue...How to break out of the thread of doom - Tanya Reilly, LeadDev 5 situations when synchronous communication is a must - Hiba Amin, Hypercontext We’re all spending a lot more time in written communication than we were before, and there are huge advantages! But there are some common failure modes, including having interminable conversations that don’t actually result in some conclusion. Reilly has three hints for winding up those discussions: Rollup: distill a long thread into the state of the conversation - “To summarize:...
Continue...How to get useful answers to your questions - Julia Evans Evans gives advice for how to get useful answers to questions - the context she uses is technical questions, but honestly the approach works just as well for getting your boss or collaborators to answer questions in email, or anything else. She offers two pieces of advice for making it easier for the question-answerer to give you the answer: Ask yes/no questions State your current understanding And two pieces of advice for getting more...
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