2024-June Quarterly Meeting Notes and To Do Items - InBoarding

Owned by Shannon Bradley
Aug 29, 2024
3 min read

This is a brainstorming session that aims to identify areas for improvement in how we support existing ACCESS staff in finding information they need to be effective in their role, and making use of and improving the tools and processes we have.

 

pick which ones that could be incorporated into an OnBoarding, InBoarding, Offboarding process

 

Question:  What is working well for your team?

Laura Herriott (Allocations):  Regular meetings with agenda stored in Google docs.  Keeping a standing agenda provides a single repository for meeting history. Keeping developer resources free to focus on technical work.  

Joe White (Metrics): There is a lot of face-to-face interaction but there are some remote team members.  All-hands meetings are held bi-weekly.  Working as specified in their PEP.  The goal is to have everyone in the team familiar with high-level project activities.  All project members participate in program-level activities to foster career development. Also regularly attending the RP forum.  Use slack regularly, including the ACCESS slack for interaction with other teams. Thinks there should be more technical exchanges to keep developers aware of what other teams are building.  Shawn’s comment:  there is a lot of discussion around developers.  

Jim Griffoen (Support):  Support is a collection of interrelated projects that proceed in parallel with one another.  Each of the activities have their own weekly meetings, and sometimes cross-meet as needed.  We also have a project-wide meeting every two weeks.  We have a large student group that uses discord, we mostly use slack.  We also make heavy use of Confluence. Tony Elam: We encourage demonstrations so team members can see the progress.  Students present their progress at weekly meetings. 

Dave Hudak (Support): We had separate technical and leadership meetings, but eventually merged them.  There is no “human API” where for each project in the program we could identify a point of contact (POC) or subject matter expert(SME)  for each track.  

Jess Haney (Operations): Having pre-identified POCs for other tracks would help in our work.  

 

Shawn’s question:  What pain points?

Laura Herriott (Allocations): Working Group’s are a heavy lift. She would like the EC to empower staff to push decision-making deeper into the levels of the program.  

Jess Haney (Operations): I’ve found it difficult to speak up during this June 2024 ACCESS Qtrly meeting because I’m actively learning while people are sharing their status.  

Laura Herriott (Allocations): I would like the EC to provide more coordination for the overall program.

Joe White (Metrics): More transparency would be beneficial. 

Jim Griffoen (Support): The current minutes do not convey everything needed.  A summary email may also be useful.  Perhaps a “what’s everyone working on” once a month? There is some confusion as to who our users are.  Here in Support, our users are the ACCESS users.  Sharing feedback from our user community would be helpful as well.  

Lavanya Podila (ACO): John Towns does an EC debrief at the ACO team meetings.  That has proved helpful.  

Jess Haney (Operations):  A potential structural improvement could be a type of mentorship program, particularly for bridging the gap between a team member and the broader organization.  Another potential structural improvement (especially for the Operations’ concierge role) would be having an “embed” (~1-2 weeks or total 40 working hours) within each ACCESS Track to help members network across teams and familiarize with various workflows.