#22 - Link Roundup, 26 June 2020
New manager training; Being glue; Inclusive leadership; Hearing your team's best ideas; Managing up from home
Hi!
As we get ready to move our team from one institution to another, we’re taking the opportunity to reconsider how we do things on our team and reset expectations about how we operate and what we’re aiming to achieve - as a team, and as a project. The switch to working from home was an earlier opportunity to clarify and reset, too.
In Canada, 77% of IT organizations say that expectations around everyone going to the office everyday have been changed probably irreversably by the pandemic. With universities, hospitals, and research institutes constantly tight on space, I have to think that a lot of our organizations are having similar conversations. In the jobs section, there’s a first for the newsletter - a manager position listed a remote position. At your org, are people discussing having work from home being a serious option in the future? Is anyone considering operating as a fully- or mostly-distributed team indefinitely?
On to the link roundup:
Managing Teams
New Manager Training: The 4 concepts to Teach - Claire Lew, Know Your Team
Being Glue - Tanya Reilly
If you’re at the point where you’re starting to manage (or groom) team leads or managers, Clair Lew’s article and collection of resources on four things to teach new managers is useful. Her four concepts to teach (which she covers in details with resources to use to to teach them are):
The mindset shift: IC → Manager. (This is so important; no promotion or job change is as tough a transition as your that move from IC to manager - and I say that after switching fields from astrophysics to genomics!)
The importance of trust
1-on-1 meetings are your most high-leverage tool as a manager
Answer the questions, ”What’s going on?” and ”Where are we going?” for your team
Tanya Reilly’s talk focuses an aspect the first one - that as a manager, an increasing amount of your time is spent doing”glue work” rather than the technical work of the team. And while that glue work is necessary for everything to come together (and stay together), it isn’t as valued as the technical work. So much so that ICs stepping up and doing that glue work aren’t seen as overreaching or as promotion material, but more often as being less capable than the ICs focussed on the nuts and bolts of their tasks.
The Manager’s Guide to Inclusive Leadership — Small Habits That Make a Big Impact - First Round Review
This is a really nice article that’s well worth your time about more inclusive leadership. They give some four high-level topics:
Invite and display authenticity
Build self-awareness and curiosity
Seek out and respond well to feedback
Lift up other perspectives consistently
But then go relatively deeply into each of them and give specific questions you can ask and approaches you can take. The contributors are trainers at LifeLabs Learning, which leads training and facilitation around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and the article links to a much longer 25-page open-sourced playbook for starting up a DEI team which also looks promising.
You Might Not Be Hearing Your Team’s Best Ideas - Michael Parke and Elad N. Sherf, HBR
We’ve talked about the importance of disagreement and input before, and how important it is that people feel ok speaking up. This is another article on the topic, and it breaks the steps down into managing what people are saying but also managing the silence, what people aren’t saying, which I think is a useful way to think about things.
Managing Your Own Career
How to “manage up” from home- The Economist
Since many of us have been working from home for the past three months, it’s been harder managing our team, but maybe even harder being visible to our bosses (and other senior stakeholders) and maintaining those connections.
As with our teams, there’s no magic here - we just need to do what we should always be doing, communicating, listening, and documenting. And as with our team, while we could get away with being less explicit and intentional about some of these steps when we were all in an office together, distance means we need to put more discipline into these sorts of actions.
Random
Some readers might be interested in WireViz, a tool that generates wiring diagrams from yaml files describing the items and their connections.
In praise of (the original) Hungarian Notation for software development, to help ”make wrong code look wrong”.
The case for SQLite as an application file format for anything that outputs stuff that looks like tables.
AWS has released Honeycode, it’s low/no-code tool for simple web and mobile apps. It’s clearly aimed at being, amongst other things, an Airtable-killer. Is anyone using these kinds of tools or other low/no code packages to quickly deliver applications in a research computing context?
That’s it…
And that’s it for another week.
Have a great weekend, and good luck in the coming week with your research computing team,
Jonathan
Jobs Leading Research Computing Teams
Senior Director of Scientific Computing Group - Progenity, San DIego CA USA
Develops and aligns partners on a vision and roadmap for the scientific computing needs of R&D, technologies and capabilities to support and accelerate Progenity research goals. Leads and builds a high performing team of scientific technology personnel, execution and maintenance for all scientific computing and including genomics, inventory management, regulatory tools, LIMS and others.
Senior Software Manager, High Performance Inference Platform - NVIDIA, Santa Clara CA USA
You will pioneer new ways of developing and productizing high performance, highly available AI workflows infrastructure for medical imaging and healthcare. Build and demonstrate platform, profiling, orchestration capabilities, integrating Open Source and 3rd party components as well as building core components. Develop and integrate profiling and orchestration capabilities for new Deep Learning and machine learning workfoads.
Manager of Data Science - TEEMA, Vancouver BC CA
Reporting to the Director of Digital, the Manager of Data Science will be responsible for leading a geographically distributed (Vancouver, Santiago and Sparwood) and rapidly growing team of data scientists, data engineers and data analysts within the digital organization
Sr. Manager, Product & Science - Amazon, Vancouver BC CA
Discover, define, and apply scientific, engineering, and business best practice while delivering science for $1B+ opportunities. · Partner with scientists, economists, and engineers to help deliver scalable ML and econometric models while building tools to help our customers gain and apply insights.
Sr. Manager, Data Science - Amazon, Seattle WA USA
You will help us define new ways to evaluate, visualize, predict, and understand talent outcomes and decisions like hiring, promotions, and transfers. You will lead research and drive greenfield invention as part of a team of economists, data scientists, software engineers, applied scientists, product managers, and UX designers. This is an opportunity to fundamentally redefine talent management for one of the largest and most complex workforces in the world.
Senior Full Stack Engineer - Ufonia, Oxford UK
On a day-to-day basis you will work alongside our Chief Product Officer, taking a key leadership role defining the technology strategy and architecture for our back- and front-end services. You will set this strategy from the frontline, writing code, working all the way from database to the UI and perhaps tweaking our NLP pipeline in between.
Scientific I&IT Coordinator - Ministry of the Solicitor General, Ontario, Toronto ON CA
Lead and manage multiple medium to large scale projects of laboratory databases, content management systems, internet/intranet resources and automation. Provide support to the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) in the CFS.
Deputy Director, Data Management - Sanofi, Toronto ON CA
The Deputy Director, Data Management will deliver high quality data engineering solutions to support data scientists, data analysts, and business user applications. They will report to the Director Data Science. The span of responsibility for this position covers data management strategy, data project delivery, and overseeing data operations team
Programming Manager - GlaxoSmithKline, Brentford UK
In recognition of the developing sophistication and technical requirements of the role, Clinical Programming was formed as a standalone department distinct to Clinical Statistics. Programming asset teams are now stepping up to achieve the goal of being the Biostatistics’ leaders of delivery and execution, in a way that optimises, expedites and delivers to the highest quality.
Manager, Data & Analytics - Canada Life Assurance Company, London ON CA
The Intake and Operations Manager is responsible for managing data intake, planning, and the end to end data pipeline, with change management acting as a key area of focus to drive cultural change.
Lead Data Manager - Covance, WFH UK
As the study Lead Data Manager; be accountable for all DM deliverables per the established timeline; providing instruction to their DM study team(s) and review of their study team’s output to ensure the highest delivery quality, while adjusting resource allocations accordingly.
Data Manager - NHS Scotland, Edinburgh UK
Lead and manage members of the team involved in data management services ensuring data are timely, accurate and fit for purpose
Building Project Manager, Data Centres - Michael Page Property, London, UK
A multinational multi-disciplinary Consultancy client is seeking Senior Project Manager with Data Centre experience