Our most recent all-staff meeting

Kevin, I felt the same - the All Staff could have/should have gone better. I asked DLT staff their opinion of how it went and one consistent response was that they'd like you not to have to rush or condense your own presentation. Perhaps time for Q&A and discussion on points you raised would be useful too. In addition, the video obviously had a powerful message (can't remember what it was now but ...) - what do we do with that message next?

My read is that people want first and foremost to know what you're thinking and where you want the org to go and how you see us getting there. They want to be able to connect with you and ask questions. They want to know about the forces driving you and us.

As far as the rest of the agenda in the main session, getting input from ITS is important in guiding your choice, but ultimately it's an opportunity for you to say, "Here are the one or two things at the top of my list that I want you to hear about."

I have to admit that I had the same reaction, this just should and could have been better. I agree with both Mairead and Phil (which could be a first and last) that people want to have time to connect with you and find out what is important to you and our organization. The slide that you presented with many tiny characters representing what was at the top of your inbox over the last six months had a number of items that would have been great to hear detail about. Your small slice of the meeting was much too rushed.

Also, I personally don't like the breakout sessions. We only get ITS together as a group twice a year and it just doesn't make sense to then break us all apart. Some of the breakout sessions would provide good material to present during the All-Staff while we are all together. For example, the room where you were speaking was the fullest and an interesting topic for most of ITS. There simply was not enough room for people to attend. I think the OHR presentation would make a good forum discussion but does not provide a good session for all. We are too diverse in our choices to cover in an All-Staff.

In Summary, ITS is doing a lot of exciting work and our meeting simply did not reflect that. We work hard and rarely have time to find out what is happening in units around us and this was a missed opportunity for just that.

I'd like to see a synopsis of accomplishments throughout ITS since the last all-staff, followed by future directions - your vision and senior director's visions.

Critical information that affects all ITS employees should be carefully weighed on a case-by-case basis for inclusion here. The health/benefits info was interesting, but I personally would rather have that in print.

What sort of activity justifies the University paying for, what, 600 man-hours of IT staff?

The experiment running Adobe Connect seemed worth while. More large scale, everybody involved experiments seems to make sense. But with blogs catching on, I don't need to walk across campus and sit in a crowded room at some one else's convenience to hear what Kevin is thinking- I've got him right here.

Getting everyone together like we just did may have outlived its usefulness, unless we generate new knowledge by getting together (Improve virtual meeting for Penn State; try meeting with other IT groups on other campuses or colleges) or enhance our humanity ( play softball, bowl, eat, drink, talk...). Just sitting through a live blog entry, getting something we can read about later with equal affect, will always be a disappointment.

I disagree with David. Personal contact is important. Perhaps not necessarily for the information imparted but for the emotional content.

True, some of the things talked about at these meetings can be just as effective remotely (email, blogs, etc), but there's nothing like face-time to help you get to know someone.

Today's trends in the direction of remote contact, if taken too far, could result in a distance between ITS staff departments that could make it harder to work together in the future.

As some of you know, I’m not a big fan of blogs but I felt the need to weigh in on this one. Certain methods of communication are fine for certain settings/tasks. As much as I respect Dave’s opinion, there are times when it’s important and necessary to bring people together for some face-to-face conversation. I for one see the staff meetings as a valuable vehicle for bringing us together in one room at the same time to learn what other areas of ITS are doing. If we need to adjust the format, so be it – but I certainly wouldn’t want to give them up altogether.

I feel that we as an IT organization become too dependent on technology and completely overlook the human equation. Use of technology is good but is not always the answer. Our mission is to serve the students, faculty, and staff at this University – not hide behind our computers and lose all contact with the world. If we can’t join together 2-3 times a year to communicate and interact with each other, then how are we supposed to continue to professionally serve and meet the needs of our constituents?

I totally agree that Kevin needs more time for his presentation so that we can hear more in-depth what’s happening with some very important projects with which ITS is involved. But I also think it’s important for the staff to engage themselves in the meetings – not only by actively participating and asking questions during the meeting but the planning of these events as well. Robin sends an e-mail out prior to every staff meeting. Take the time to respond – provide them with your input so that they can structure the sessions in a meaningful way so that everyone can take something valuable and/or thought provoking away from the meeting.

Personally, I would like to either have more frequent meetings (for a shorter period of time) OR less frequent meetings (for a longer duration). I think it would be beneficial for us to have a ½ day retreat where we can all come together to hear current happenings but more importantly so that we can brainstorm about directions in which “we” think ITS should be going. It should not be expected that Jeff and Kevin provide all the answers. Since it’s still early under our new leadership, this is our opportunity to have a significant impact on the direction in which ITS goes. A ½ day session would also be a good setting in which to provide diversity and/or any other group training.

I agree it just didn't feel quite right. I have to say it seemed everyone wanted to hear more from Kevin with time for Q&A. I think that's very positive and really wanted to hear the unabridged version!

In the spirit of the new themes we have many groups within ITS. It may be useful for each of the Sr. Directors or some of the Directors/Managers to go over as mentioned above accomplishments, or what I would rather see are current initiatives related to their units operation. I wouldn't suggest every unit contribute each meeting possibly just the efforts Kevin regarded as significant. This could create opportunities for others to glean information, spark collaborative or complementary efforts and may be mutually beneficial to ITS. You could handle this in the breakouts but I'm thinking it would be worth the whole group hearing.

OHR and Benefits has its place but I'm not sure this is it? For a group our size it would be suicide for anyone to come in and give us inside information on a topic. So, all we'll ever get is the party line, which we all probably already know or one could guess with some certainty.

Ice cream is good too! I think this is as much a vehicle to get folks together that normally don't see each other as it is just a nice thing to do (Thanks Kevin).

In terms of specific presentations, I was also disappointed in the Benefits presentation. In past years, it covered upcoming changes in benefits, but this year it rehashed a benefit that I think most of us were familiar with.

I would have like to hear more about the new initiatives Kevin mentioned and the meaning of the survey results. It was hard for Vicki to go last in this one.

As far as the format, while I agree that human contact is important, I have to agree with Dave that I'm not sure a large meeting is any better at providing the human touch than this blog.

As any frustrated instructor knows, just because 500 kids are sitting together in the Forum doesn't mean their heads are engaged. There's also no guarantee that students talk to students they don't already know.

Truthfully, I find interactions at smaller venues much more meaningful. For instance ETS and ITS Training co-sponsor a usability webinar series, and I really value them for a chance to talk with new colleagues in a relaxed setting. The great thing about ITS is that there are so many of these opportunities available.

Ditto on more time from Kevin.

I would like to hear a mix of "did you know...ITS has been doing this for a while, ITS just started doing this, and ITS is working on project X for future roll-out". For me, when I leave a meeting like the all-staff and hear folks say "That's interesting, I didn't know we did that" you had a success. These updates could be done by Kevin, the Sr. Directors or the manager overseeing a project.

We all interact with different groups of customers around the University. It is great when they ask you a question that is outside of your normal scope and you can say I know ITS is working on that, let me get you in contact with them.

As far as getting us all in one area, personally I like it. This week I was trying to get 6 ITS members together to hold a 15 minute update conversation. The 6 of us are in 4 different locations and it would take us more than 15 minutes to walk to a single location to talk. So, we met prior to the All-Staff and had the discussion over ice cream (and I didn't have to fill out a group meal form!!).

I have never made it to a break out session at any of the all-staff meetings, so I can't comment there. I have gone each time with great intentions, but have become involved in individual or small group discussion following the meeting every time that continued through the sessions. We are so spread across campus that this gives us a chance to see faces we don't run into every day.

I agree with Dave that for all the time and effort put into it, I'd hoped the main session would be more engaging and that the format can use some tweaking. I don't think he was advocating getting rid of it because there are benefits to getting together, but that it could be changed.

I think the main session was informative, but not necessarily conversational for me.

I enjoyed the breakout sessions because there was discussion and different opinions and if that could come back a little into the main session, I think it would have been better.

I took advantage of being in the large group, though. I made contact with a lot of people and got little bits of work done and got updated on what some people were doing, both work and non-work related--it's amazing what I remember when I see someone.

And I sat next to a realtively new staff member who asked questions like "Who was that speaker" and "What did they mean when they said..." and I was reminded of a different perspective that I forget because I've been here longer.

Which brings me to a possible idea -- I can't tell if anyone took pictures of the staff eating ice cream, but if they did and could put those up on a web site with captions underneath describing who was talking and what they are talking about, it would help introduce staff to other staff and to new projects or ideas -- could be anything. Just a thought.

I was traveling so I missed the meeting, but it sounds like most folks value the time Kevin spends in front of them. I am also seeing a polarized view of the face to face versus the use of technology to build connections ... I am always stunned when we turn these into a situation where it has to be one or the other -- why not make it an "and"?

The F2F stuff is incredibly valuable and it gives us all the opportunity to have some real contact with people we don't usually get to see. It is also great for the kind of "in the moment" Q&A it sounds like many of the commenters here are asking for from KXM. If there is a way to minimize the number of updates during the live session and let KXM be more of the focus we may get more out of the time.

If we used the blogs to provide updates before hand staff could ask questions that KXM could moderate. What if we came up with a shared tag or category for posting information about projects to each of our blogs (or links to del.icio.us) and could aggregate all those together for all of ITS to read in an ongoing fashion? Then as all staff meetings approached many of us would not need to spend 15-20 mins listening to an update about individual projects ... we could have a conversation that KXM could moderate -- some items he could answer, other things he would pass off to the project manager/senior director/unit responsible for the project.

I guess what I am advocating for is to keep the F2F, but enhance it more intelligently with the information technology tools we are creating. Let's use the blogs to be more organized and engaged as a unit ... the things many of us are writing about would be very helpful to the rest of ITS. Should we get a tag together? How about something like psuitsupdates? It wouldn't take much to aggregate all of our updates together into a single page -- we are doing it in ETS. Here is an example of our mashed-up blogs.

Sorry that was so long.

I'm definitely of the mind that we need to agree on a starting point as to how to tag blogs (and extend into other realms such as del.icio.us) to make relevant information more discoverable. If we end up embracing this but not thinking about discovery, we'll be no better off than USENET (which isn't all bad - it just isn't as good as what we could have) and have to read N blogs to get what we need.

So what is the right forum to decide on tag prefixes? Or shall just a few of us decide and decree - and then cheer for assimilation?

Kevin writes:

So what is the right forum to decide on tag prefixes? Or shall just a few of us decide and decree - and then cheer for assimilation?

As draconian as it sounds, yes, a few should decide. I don't think you decree though; I think the "tags" spread virally. Start with a handful of ITS bloggers using the same tag (I see Cole already uses it) and soon it will become second nature. As someone once said, all taxonomies were once folksonomies.

Speaking of which, do we have one for psuWebCon2007 yet?

FWIW, I was also thinking along the lines of "more cathedral, less bazaar."

How about psuits as a prefix for starters?

What I felt walking away from the All-staff meeting has already been said: more time considering and discussing the state of things, and the needs and opportunities that the future presents, that seems to be the thing to focus on.

I also tagged some resources “psuits” before reading Kevin's suggestion. About Jim's comment: the tag for the Web Conference is “psuweb2007” (after requests to make “psuwebconference2007” shorter ;-)