September 2009 Archives

Notes from the PCMC meeting on September 23, 2009, "Change Best Practices: Minimizing Resistance to Change" presented by Nan Gesche Larsen.

• Change in our personal life focuses on the positive: new house, marriage, having a baby, etc.
• Change in work life skews negative: job loss, more responsibility, etc.
• Bad change experiences make us resistent to future change.
• Change will affect productivity. Try to squeeze personal time rather than social time. Like Google and General Mills, employers provide all manner of personal services to reduce the amount of time employees spend getting haircuts, getting oil changes, driving to day-care and what not.
• If you attempt to squeeze social time you cut off a necessary release valve. Provide good information so social time isn't spent speculating or stirring the pot.
• With change you can pay now or you can pay later but you will pay in productivity.
• If hand-holding and cheerleading activities seem silly to upper management, translate loss of productivity into dollars.
• Engage people in decision making. Maybe they can't weigh in on the larger decisions but let them rule over the small stuff.
• Get creative and find ways to engage.
• The FUD factor = fear uncertainty doubt
• Responding to change is not an steady continuum but it is predictable. There will be dips and struggles. Work to lessen their length and severity.
• Don't forget that starting something new means ending something old. As humans we form attachments to processes and routines. Celebrate and ritualize the death of the old. Sound hokey? Perhaps, but it's still meaningful and cathartic.
• Mismanaging change can produce a toxic atmosphere long after the change takes place.
• Remember that it's often more important to be heard than agreed with.
• We can understand the need for change on an intellectual level but resistence comes from the emotional part. Find ways to deal with emotions.

I recently used the Form tool in Google Docs to conduct a survey. On balance it works great.

Pros

• Easy to build and customize.
• Can make some fields required.
• Can embed the survey in a webpage or the body of an email.
• Results are stored in a back-end, downloadable spreadsheet.
• Results are also delivered graphically.
• Can customize the response page.
• Can allow survey-takers to see the results after completing the survey.
• It's free and you don't need to agree to terms (read Survey Monkey).

Cons

• Cannot create a paginated form for longer surveys.
• Cannot customize questions based on previous responses.
• Results are in the Google space. Who owns them?
• A bug? I tested the form in advance of sending it out then cleared those rows from the back-end spreadsheet. However my test responses are still factored in the results displayed graphically.
• Would not use it to gather private or sensitive data or if I needed responders to identify themselves.

Summary

The Form tool in Google Docs is a quick and easy way to send out surveys. It's perfect for internal polling of non-sensitive data like gathering anonymous feedback on a training session or organizing a group potluck.

Here I am at the Communicators' Forum event, "Analytics & Measurement: Are My Communications Effective?" where...

Andy Merrill of the Office of Measurement Services (OMS) will discuss what and how to measure and how OMS can help.

The general counsels office worries about third party tools

• Can't ensure data privacy. Who owns the data?
• Click-through agreements are contracts and should go through the General Counsels office.

Is your data collection aligned with the overall strategy of the University? U Relations wants it branded properly.

Rhonda Zurn of the Institute of Technology will describe her recent experience gauging the effectiveness of the college's magazine, Inventing Tomorrow, in reaching alumni.

Talked about her experience evaluating the impact of Inventing Tomorrow magazine.

One challenge was parsing anecdotal information. Budget crunch put pressure on proving return on publication. They braced for the results. They went with a thrid party and found foundation funds to pay for it.

Start with what do you want to know and put them in the form of a question. Not questions that will be on the survey but the once swirling in your head.

Determine the best survey method. They did a telephone survey. It's a push rather than pull. You get a better sample than those who just feel strongly about the issue. Made sure they asked questions useful to other departments. For example, a question asking how likely the recipient would be to make a donation was very interesting to the development office.

Survey turned into real actionable items for going forward.

Used http://tickspot.com/ to track time spent.

"Stay home if you are sick" is the number one directive from the University in dealing with the H1N1 flu virus. Then, "stay home until you have been fever-free for 24 hours." Even if you don't catch the flu, perhaps your child will. Even if you and your children don't get sick, your child's school or day-care center may close. The chance that you will need to stay home at some point during this flu season is extremely high.

What does this mean for the OIP? It says to me a lot of people will be working from home. Doing your job remotely on a different computer doesn't always go smoothly. How can a 3-person technology department deal with an increase in support calls on computers we don't support?

Prevent the Spread

• Put Purell bottles where people share computers. (LAC Resource Center, Confucius Institute Resource Center, student worker computers on Heller 2, Heller 6 and Dean's Office)
• Encourage technology staff to use remote technology (Terminal, Apple Remote Desktop, iChat screen sharing) to trouble-shoot computers.
• Encourage all employees to use the phone or internet (Skype, iChat, GoogleTalk) to communicate with co-workers.
• Allocate space and resources for a quarantine where infected employees can work.

Plan for Absenteeism

• Find out the typical absentee rate during the flu season and model for an escalating rate of absenteeism.
• Identify critical and non-critical job functions then focus on the critical ones.
• Have each employee prepare an individual contingency plan for how they would do their job remotely.
• Identify resources employees need and how those resources will be allocated. (We only have so many laptops to lend. Who gets priority?)
• Tell employees about the tools they need to work remotely (VPN Client, Remote Desktop Client, Skype).
• Train employees to work remotely (connect to servers, check email, forward their voicemail, start a video chat).
• Plan for a different kind of stress on the network. Do we need more computers to accept RDC connections?

Other Concerns

• What about FERPA? If employees are working outside the network, they cannot email unencrypted private data!
• We need to make clear we cannot support employee's home computers.
• Read these guidelines for businesses on the CDC website.

We held a brief close-out meeting for the Publication Order Form project. A few things are worth calling out and applying to future projects.

• Technology problems blew our timeline utterly. While not of our making and beyond our control, we could have conducted a more sober assessment of the technological hurdles before we began the project. Having done a more thorough assessment of risk, we would have budgeted more time and planned for contingencies.
• We didn't communicate enough. I stopped reporting to stakeholders once the project was delayed. It's hard to communicate when there's no progress. Rather than take the no-news-is-bad-news approach, I should have continued to send periodic updates.