[2639] in Release_7.7_team
Feedback from my team on the Academic Computing Offsite.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Mar 7 18:57:35 2001
Message-ID: <MudgfeJz00015PpZ1V@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 23:57:30 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: longpd@MIT.EDU, ganderso@MIT.EDU, vkumar@MIT.EDU
CC: release-team@MIT.EDU, lcs@MIT.EDU, itlt@MIT.EDU
Phil, Greg, Vijay:
As you know, I took 3 Athena Release Team meetings and worked
with my team on what I learned at the Academic Computing Offsite.
The purpose of this note is to inform you of what I told my team, and
what the team member said in reply. I hope you will find I gave a
reasonable report to the team of the Offsite, and that the feedback from
the team is useful in moving forward.
I've divided what I will say here into four sections:
Who is the team.
What I told the team.
What I asked the team.
What the team said to me.
One other background note: I do much better communicating one on one
than in groups, so before working with the Athena Release Team, I visited
the team members who report to me individually, and gave an initial
presentation. I felt this would help reduce anxiety over
misunderstanding.
---- Who is the team ----
The Athena Release Team is a convenient venue for me to have a team meeting.
People who report to me who attend Release Team are:
Bob Basch, Miki Lusztig, Andrew Boardman, Greg Hudson,
Todd Belton.
Others who attend Release Team are:
Jonathon Weiss (who, having attended the offsite helped!)
Oliver Thomas (He too attended the offsite.)
Abby Fox (who has a good customer perspective)
Heather Anne Harrison (who reports to Jean Cavanaugh, but
whom I have some responsibility for.)
Garry Zacheiss (who reports to jweiss, but whom I feel some
responsibility toward.)
Larry Stone is the only person who reports to me who does not attend
Release Team. I have had direct conversations with him on the Academic
Computing Direction. But his involvement in Stellar and OKI already
anticipates a lot of the new direction.
As you see, this was a good group of people representing not only my team
but people my team interacts with who have a stake in the new Academic
Computing direction.
---- What I told the team ----
I attended a day-long offsite talking about a new direction for Academic
Computing. The offsite consisted of two parts. In the first part Vijay
and Jeff Schiller gave presentations on a new direction. In the second
part,
team leaders were asked four questions:
What are you doing now?
What goes away based on the new direction?
What are you not doing that you should begin doing?
What are the barriers/impediments to success?
I summarized the new direction as follows:
Instead of focusing on the 20-30 technologically savvy MIT faculty,
there is a desire to serve the 80% heretofore not served.
Instead of being technology focused, the new direction will be customer
focused: meeting customers where THEY are to enhance education
with technology that becomes progressively less intrusive over time.
It is understood that the new, intended customer base is much larger,
and is NOT technologically savvy.
It means that what we've been doing up to now may become less important
compared to what we will be doing in the future.
Examples of specific projects that embody the new direction are:
1 to 1 computing where individually owned laptops become computing
infrastructure.
Initiatives where the faculty use the web as an important means of
publishing course information, and students use the web as an important
means of fetching course information.
This means, for example that professors probably want a "button to click
on to publish their paper on the web" and probalby don't care if it's
AFS, or
FTP.
It means, for example, that public Athena Workstations probably diminish
in importance compared to privately owned systems.
I also pointed out that during the second half of the offsite, that most
people's responses were of the form, "We don't see much of anything we
can quit doing right away." and were firmly grounded in business as we
do it now, rather than business as we might do it in the future.
---- What I asked the team ----
I asked the team members to consider what role they would play in the
new way of doing business.
I asked the team members to try and be creative in their approaches to
today's work to try and be influenced by the new direction.
---- What the team said to me ----
The team members had a tough time understanding what exactly was being
intended with this new direction.
Many interesting questions were posed about the specifics of the 1 to 1
Computing Initiative, the Open Courseware Initiative, and the Open
Knowledge Initiative. The team members were hungry for specifics about
what was being planned so they might make an informed choice about
what role to seek. I found myself replying that very few specifics had
yet been worked out, and that the team members should try and
participate in the discussions and help set the specifics by
contributing their experience.
There was anxiety over the unknown aspects of how people's jobs
might change. Again people were hungry for more specifics about
strategies and projects on offer.
Jonathon suggested the best way to interpret the information from the
Offsite is as a "Heads up" more than an announcement of specific
strategies or projects.
Team members expressed the opinion that additional resources would be
required to take on this new focus because continuity of service in the
current businesses would need to be maintained while changing to the new
businesses.
I was asked to pass that resource concern back to the IS Leadership.
I was also asked to communicate that team members felt that associated
with the pursuit of a larger, less savvy customer base entailed other
kinds of resource issues:
Meeting customers where they are may conflict with providing simple solutions.
Deploying solutions quickly may conflict with deploying solutions that
are carefully constructed to be maintainable, scalable and of high
quality.
Along the way, I suggested a possible resourcing idea: A temporary
increase of resources to transition to the new businesses followed by
a return to current levels when the transition is complete.
Team members also wanted reassurance that their roles as technical
contributors was still valued by MIT, and that the new Academic
Computing direction was not, to give an extremely exaggerated example,
to become a typing pool to put professor's notes on the web.
Overall, there is anxiety over the amount that it unknown, but willingness
to align with a focus on the customer, and on meeting customers where they are.
----
I will take this opportunity to apologize in advance for imperfectly
communicating what transpired at the Offsite, and at the Release Team
meetings. I encourage all readers to look beyond the specifics I got wrong
and focus on next steps of:
Clarifying the strategies to be followed in the new direction.
Reducing anxiety around the unknown.
Explicitly address the issue of prioritization and resourcing.
Giving each other credit for good faith efforts to understand and work
together in a changing environment.
-wdc
