This is the second installment in the LIS Quarterly Update that I began in January. The intention in writing this is to both look back on the last 3 months to reflect on what has happened, and to look forward to the next 3 months and beyond to provide us with a sense of direction, to reduce the number of surprises, and to make sure that those affected by new projects and new policies have a chance for feedback and input. Continue reading
Every month I get a report about printing statistics from Papercut, the system we use to manage our printers. One of the things Papercut measures is how many pages did not get printed, and how much that reduced our carbon footprint. For January, nearly 10,000 jobs amounting to over 16,000 pages were not printed, saving 85.3 KG of carbon.
Welcome to 2012! As part of my ongoing effort to keep LIS and the College community aware of and involved in the work of LIS, I’ve decided to start writing a quarterly report. The report will offer highlights from the last three months, and describe our upcoming priorities, longer-term issues we should begin to consider, and other institutional planning efforts with which we must connect. Given the constraints of our budget and staffing, it is clear that we need to understand our priorities, make hard choices, and focus our efforts on the areas and initiatives that will make the most difference. Continue reading
In the upcoming months, we’ll have the consultant Fred Schmitt on campus doing some work with our teams. In advance of his arrival, I thought it useful to outline what we’ve asked Fred to help us with. We have two major objectives:
1. We want everyone in LIS who has not yet gone through ‘team training’ to spend half a day becoming familiar with the concepts, the roles, and the vocabulary of teams. This will be useful for those who are presently on teams but have not yet been trained. Since we imagine that at some point nearly everyone in LIS will be on a team, we think it useful to have everyone trained. Many who have gone through these workshops have reported that the principles apply equally well to traditional work within a workgroup.
2. We want to re-align the existing teams. We’ve been using teams as a way to accomplish important work that spans our workgroups and areas structure. Having this experience, we need to figure out how to answer questions that we now have about roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities; communication; balancing work in a team with work in a workgroup. We also want to re-confirm the charges for the teams.
You’ll soon be getting more information about this, and invitations to meetings. In advance, if you have specific questions or concerns that you would like to make sure we cover, please feel free to email me, and I will make sure that they are included in these workshops.
Terry Simpkins wrote up a handy FAQ that may help answer questions you may have about teams:
Q. When will the team training be?
A. Probably on Fridays during the management training weeks, but this is not set in stone yet.
Q. Will there be a team leader component?
A. Yes, there will be a discussion of the various roles (member, leader, sponsor, director group, workgroup manager) that are involved in the teams.
Q. Can teams revisit their membership when finished with their charge?
A. This seems reasonable, and it feels like an appropriate time to look at team memberships. However, teams are not limited to this, and should revisit membership whenever it is necessary, for any reason.
Q. Should we require anyone without team training to take it, even if not currently slated to be on a team?
A. Yes, that is the plan.
Q. Can we implement a system for rotating members off teams?
A. This issue definitely needs more thought and clarity. Membership on a team was never intended to be a life sentence, and we certainly want team members to be enthusiastic about being on the team. Whether or not we institute a (renewable) term length is an open question, but at any rate we should clarify this idea (that serving on a team can have an end date) so everyone is aware of it.
Q. Is team membership an implicit requirement for staff? Are certain staff members “exempt” from teams?
A. All staff should be considered as potential candidates for teams. We try to match organizational needs with staff interests whenever possible, and we have to consider workloads as well, so staff involved with a particularly large project may be temporarily exempt from serving on a team. But no one gets a permanent pass.
Q. Do all teams really last forever? What’s that all about?
A. Teams are intended to address ongoing needs that can not be effectively handled by individual workgroups or areas. Unlike, say, the intern program, they are not intended to simply deal with a short-term project need. So the assumption is that most teams will be ongoing, until such time as the work changes, or the work becomes “routine-ized” to the extent that it is integrated (or there is a plan to integrate it, like the work of the digital archives team) into a workgroup’s duties. However, the changing tech landscape, college priorities, etc. can all effect the team’s work and lifespan.
One interesting thing from our discussion about these issues was something Fred said. Basically, it’s not the idea of the “team” itself that is important, but rather, the important thing is creating a culture of teamwork and “unmanaged harmony.” We might get to a point where collaboration is so second-nature to us that we no longer need teams. That would probably be the ideal situation! But I found it very interesting to hear this.
If you go to the English version of Wikipedia this Wednesday, you’ll find that they have ‘gone dark’ in protest of proposed federal legislation that in the name of stopping on-line piracy would put in place a set of tools that many fear would result in, among other bad things, internet censorship. While we won’t be making our website go dark in solidarity, it seemed that the least we could do would be to provide visibility to this important protest of legislation that many of us find deeply troubling.
More readings on the topic can be found at http://www.diigo.com/list/michaelroy/sopa .
When you come to work Monday morning, you’ll see a variety of electronic and print announcements that the portal that we’ve been working on over the past few months has gone live. You can preview it at http://portal.middlebury.edu . I wanted to give everyone who might be asked questions or for help a heads up that with all this publicity, there will likely be questions. You can send those questions to liswebapplications@middlebury.edu or via the web at http://m.middlebury.edu/feedback/ . Congratulations to the web services team in general and Matt LaFrance in particular for pulling this together!
Am I the only one who sees a paper airplane that floats erratically to the floor of the atrium on our blog? Anyone know how it got there?
-m
There’s a great scene in Dr. Stangelove where the existence of the Russian’s doomsday machine is revealed, but at a moment when it is too late for its explosion to be stopped.
For those not familiar with the movie, the doomsday machine is a nuclear device that can destroy the entire planet in a single explosion, whose triggering is automated, and once triggered, can not be stopped. In this critical scene, Dr. Stangelove complains that the whole idea of having a doomsday machine only works if you tell someone that it exists. Having a secret doomsday device is not a very good strategy. As he points out, “the whole point is lost if you keep it a secret.”
I think about this insight often when I think about our efforts to communicate with our community, and with ourselves, about all of the services and resources that we make available. Without an effective way to allow people to know about what we provide for them, we risk spending lots of time and money on things that few will ever know about. Thinking about how we are going to communicate when we change something or add something should be integral to the process of changing or adding something.
One of the major ways we communicate what’s new and what’s changed is via the LIS Blog. In turn, some items from our blog find their way into MiddPoints, the LIS eNewsletter, and our Facebook and Twitter feeds. On a monthly basis, a small group sifts through the LIS Blog to assemble the eNewsletter. Of late, we’ve found that despite all of the changes we’ve made to our services, there is no corresponding posting to point to. Over the years, we’ve tried various strategies for being systematic about always posting to the LIS Blog when there is something new or changed that we want our community to be aware of. We hope not to have to return to the days when we had to hound contributors. That was annoying for all involved. To that end, I turn the question over to you: what can we do across the organization to get into the habit of always posting to the LIS blog news about what’s new and what’s changed in order to avoid having to be heavy-handed about this?
A second question about the LIS Blog that I have is whether or not we should continue to run the blog as a public blog. WordPress, the software that powers the LIS Blog, is now able to easily cross-post items to other blogs (that’s how we get posts from the LIS Blog to MiddPoints). I wonder if we ought to create an LIS-only Blog where we post and where we read, and then create a mechanism for selected posts to make their way to a public LIS Blog and to MiddPoints. The advantage of doing this is that I suspect we might be more apt to make comments, to try out ideas, and to share more insider information if we knew that only our colleagues in LIS would be able to read the posts and the comments. Am I alone in thinking that this might be a good idea? What other ways might we accomplish the goal of encouraging more contributions, more dialogue, and more communication within LIS? (If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your thoughts on the public LIS blog, send me an email!)