DataCite Member Countries

Our task has been to complete the work on a Metadata Kernel document to prepare it for community comment in August and early September.

Fortunately for me, I have the able assistance of a Swiss DataCite member librarian. She and I meet weekly on Thursdays. It’s late afternoon for her and very early in the morning for me. We use Adobe Connect, a service hosted by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) on behalf of DataCite. Most of the time, this works really well for us, although I have been known to appear inadvertently as an alien avatar from time to time.

In order to move the work along, I split the Metadata Kernel document into pieces and turned these into wiki-based documents, so that they could be worked on asynchronously. Meanwhile, I encouraged the members of the Working Group to form subgroups and “adopt” a portion of the document for authoring or revision. I did this because I felt that our efforts to coordinate large group teleconferences had not been very successful prior to the Hannover meeting. I had hoped that smaller teams with less of a geographic stretch might succeed in a shorter time-frame.

The heightened schedule was formed by a start date beginning in mid-June, and something my Swiss colleague warned me about when we returned from Hannover: virtually all the Europeans (herself excepted) would be going on vacation for the month of August.

Here are a few things I’ve picked up as the weeks have zoomed by:

• Information exchanges between California and Continental Europe have a one-way trip of one day, meaning that joint decisions take at least two days.
• It’s helpful to watch all the wiki pages. It gives me an idea about which sub-groups are active or inactive, and that lets me know when to send reminders and encouragements.
• I asked the TIB to install a group calendar plug-in, and then I asked the members to indicate planned absences of longer than one week. This has helped me keep those long upcoming vacations in mind as I choreograph the due dates of various pieces of work.

I’m certain I have more to learn about this process, and I have the best teachers: my colleagues on the DataCite Metadata Working Group.

NGTS Teams working on "Whole Brain" exercise

To prepare the teams for the work ahead and to give them an orientation to transformational thinking, the senior executives overseeing the NGTS initiative asked Katharine Mitchell, an Internal Organization Development Consultant, from the Center for Organizational and Workforce Effectiveness (COrWE) at UC Berkeley, to facilitate the primary discussions.

Mitchell led everyone through a series of exercises using the “Whole Brain Model,” suggesting that what the team members would learn about each would “lay the groundwork for effective work as virtual teams.”

Turning to the transformational change topic, Mitchell had given as preparatory reading the very interesting “Awake at the Wheel: Moving Beyond Change Management to Conscious Change Leadership.” This article argues that, when environmental forces have changed dramatically, you have to abandon mere change management and move to transformational thinking, a “fundamental shift in mindset, organizing principles, behavior, and/or culture, as well as organizational changes, all designed to support new business directions.” Mitchell led a conversation about what is and isn’t transformational change, as opposed to merely developmental or transitional change. One person remarked “Maybe transformational change can’t be managed.”

After lunch, it was my turn to provide these teams with a quick overview of project management.  I said, when you are heading into the unknown, you may not be able to manage every aspect, but you can provide some markers for yourself. You can keep a record of what you have done, and you can communicate with your sponsor in order to ask for help when needed.

I have been under the gun more times than once, and I had thought about what the minimal requirements for tracking status, avoiding pitfalls, and staying in touch would be. They have to hit the ground running, as their progress reports are due by the end of July. So, I recommended 4 simple steps. (I should note that each team was launched with an official Charge document that could hold the place of a scope/charter.)

1. Create task list, with target dates (establish rhythm, identify obstacles, divide up work)
2. Identify obstacles (What has medium to high likelihood of delaying your ability to succeed? What can you do in response, if it comes to pass?)
3. Establish rhythm (communication, document sharing, issue & action item tracking)
4. Put it into action! (At each meeting, have a brief check-in on your task list. Where are we?)

I gave them an example (high level) task list and a suggested approach to reporting for their interim and progress reports.

My hope was to hit that sweet spot: enough structure to hold their work and help them forward but not too much bulk that it weighs them down and holds them back from the nimble, exciting, scary, inventive, unruly, transformational work they need to do.

I’m not sure that I hit the spot, but a very short amount of time will tell. What would you have told them? What is your list of essential steps?

I’ve written here about what it takes to work remotely, and I’ve been thinking lately about how to decide when it’s worth spending a little to bridge the distance gap. In other words, when are we being penny wise and pound foolish? Do we cut costs too far by avoiding all meetings when a strategically timed get-together would actually save resources?

Image courtesy of: San Joaquin Valley Library System, San Joaquin Valley & Sierra Foothills Photo Heritage Collection

One guide I’ve found  to partial thinking on this is Oscar Berg’s post from 2008: When to meet face to face. Berg provides a list of questions that apply to any business travel, including “Do you need to have a difficult conversation?” and “Do you have to share ‘things’ that would be difficult to experience at a distance, like touring a facility or using a piece of equipment?” It’s worth noting that he’s coming at the decision from the CO2 reduction perspective, rather than the budget reduction perspective.

My own questions have arisen in the context of project management, and my ideas are forming along these lines. I’d love to get your input too.

Aside from needing a face-to-face meeting for the project kickoff, I think it is a matter of assessing the true cost of whatever process you are engaged in. For example, if your team, or part of your team, is about to do an intensely interactive piece of work that will be characterised by ad hoc interactions and group dynamics, stop and consider how well these can be supported by the video-conferencing technologies you have. And, there is also the alternative of drawing out the interactions into an asynchronous workshop format, but this adds a time factor that needs to be counted as a cost. And, it may have an impact on the outcome as well.

So, when you assess this situation, consider, on the side of Face-to-Face, transportation plus lodging (if overnight is necessary) and meals. On the side of Virtual, consider the extra time required for the work to get done and your best assessment of any difference in quality due to the difference in technique (remember the assumptions about the task).

Instead of assuming travel is the most expensive of the two, do the math.

We anticipated a long-term initiative encompassing many projects, committees, and workgroups, and that was just from the University of California side of things ! From the beginning, we struggled to find easy-to-use, platform agnostic meeting arrangement tools, cheap but effective video conferencing mechanisms, and project tracking and document sharing spaces that developers, analysts, and managers all could embrace.

At some point, I realized that success at this level of complexity in virtual group work wasn’t just about technology, although having the right tools certainly makes a big difference. It rests too in the leadership of the coordinating core and also on the responsible participation of the colleagues involved. I began to think of something like project “citizenship.”

What I imagined was that, with such a far-flung effort, we would be best enabled as a team if each of us pushed the unique information we had to each other, rather than relying on any one particular person to pull that information from us.

My colleague Heather Christenson and I created a Best Practices document, which we gave out to all new UC project participants. In the document, we said:

Some of you are the UC’s sole representative on a HathiTrust Working Group. Some of you are members of a UC Explore Group. Some of you are doing development work with colleagues from various institutions. Some of you may have several of these roles. Depending on your role, your “project citizenship” duties will vary. If you are the only UC participant in the group, you are responsible for keeping the rest of us up to date on the activities of that group. If you are one of six, then make sure that one of the UC team is assigned to be note-taker at each meeting. For every HathiTrust activity, we need the project documentation to be kept up to date. We are all depending on each other for this.

No effort like this is perfect, but I think the idea is right: that, as we work farther apart from one another, we each need to assume responsibility for engagement that is of a somewhat different quality than what might work in entirely face-to-face project endeavors.

As an additional reference point, consider the thoughtful reflections on virtual committee work Cindi Trainor which wrote last week, in connection with her experiences on ALA committees. In her notes, you can get a picture of the real effort involved in pushing through technical challenges, and also the real advantages of working with creative people from disparate organizations to solve problems and build solutions. 

I think this ability to engage effectively on a virtual project team is a distinct skill, and, increasingly, an essential skill for the adventures that face us now and going forward. What do you think?

–Joan