jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #63 on 26 Feb 2021 and has tags Strategy: Change Management
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 the complex systems we were modelling becomes thinking about the complex people systems we’re part of; and hypothesis generation and experimentation in our work becomes hypothesis generation and experimentation about our work.
Huston’s article suggests reframing changes in team processes as experiments
Now, instead of ‘process changes’ I talk about ‘team experiments’.
and that has several advantages:
We’ve gone through a lot of experiments in our team. In some, the hypothesis ended up being soundly rejected and we moved away from the experiment, but others have taken on a life of their own and changed how we worked for years.
In some ways, the experiments that we roll back are even bigger successes for two reasons - we’ve learned something, and the team members see that their feedback is taken seriously when we try something that doesn’t work for them.
By the way - I often reference a transition from a research career to a career managing research computing teams. I hope I’m not inadvertently suggesting that this is the best, or only, career path to get to this work! It’s just a common one, and the one I know the most about, so it tends to be what I use for context.
