Evaluations of "Evals"

Nick and Nate are spending time evaluating our current Design Studio evaluation system over the next few days. Last night's post struck a chord with me. It was pretty similar to discussions I had with Ron Jeffries and relates to things I talked about in my Human Resources class. This post is to expand my reflection's on Nick's post.

An evaluation comprised of interviews could potentially put more pressure on the evaluator. However, I think this could be a good thing. In any interview situation, being able to express ideas clearly, sense the emotional and rational state of the interviewee, and maintain an ebb and flow of control in the interview as necessary. Frankly, I can't think of a reason a PM shouldn't develop skills like these.

As far as being difficult to understand, the current system is the same way. Whether spoken or written down, team members are still offering insights to the performance of other team members and it is the job of the PM to understand, compile, and analyze the evaluations of the team members. With a notepad, a good pen, and perhaps a tape recorder, an interview style evaluation would reveal the same--if not more--information as the current system.

Furthermore, I don't see understand why it is the PM's responsibility to defend anybody. Being a rational arbiter in a conversation is an important point, and it is important to have a clear-headed evaluator in the case where emotions are running high.

Moving on, I think interview style evaluations with shorter iterations would be more effective. If evaluations should be focused on how a student can improve, there should be more than four opportunities to get any real feedback or direction. This makes potential for drastic or severe changes if a student really wants to respond to feedback. If the iteration periods were shorter, a student could focus on one or two points of improvement, adjust, and move on until the next evaluation. With what we have now, any high points or low points are moderated over time to the point where whatever is being awarded or admonished has been forgotten (yay for passive voice). One of the important points impressed upon students in psychology or organizational behavioral management is that timeliness is hugely important when rewarding or correcting behavior. Another advantage of shorter iterations is that it reduces the potential that students use evaluations as a shotgun trigger to hurt other team members. There is certainly the possibility that a student who wanted to avoid confrontation would suppress any problems or issues until evals roll around and then they could blast away as they wanted. Evals should be about improvement, not venting. Therefore, in a shortened evaluation period, time no longer becomes ammunition and the evaluations offer more value to a student who truly seeks to improve.

Interviews can reveal more information than current evaluations. How many students are actually honest or specific in the current evaluation system? Suppose an evaluation reveals you did a good job in a certain area, but can't offer any information on what specific activities or instances contributed to that evaluation. Or on the contrary, suppose a student gets a negative review, but has no idea why or for what specific reasons. In an interview, a PM is in a good position to ask questions or elicit more details to get a full picture.

One drawback of interviews with shorter periods is that it means more work for the PM. Having to arrange interviews, conduct them, compile the information from each, and present reports back to students would be a lot of work in an interview. However, I think the benefits may outweigh the work here. PM's should certainly be on board with giving their team members better opportunities to respond, grow, and improve.

Another issue is that interviews may seem difficult to quantify or provide any gradable substance. First and foremost, evaluations should be about progress, not grading. DS is in a unique position in that we have to assign grades in an environment not normally driven by academic growth. In fact, I can't think of any actual growth I've experienced from Design Studio as a class.

Therefore, it would be important to identify clear goals and objectives for a Design Studio student. In the same way that a class syllabus or an overview for a chapter in a text books describes what the student should have achieved by the end, a set of Design Studio goals and objectives for a student should be expressily outlined. It should also be something reiterated and impressed into the mind of the student. If Design Studio currently has goals like I'm talking about, then we're not stressing them because I have no idea what they are off the top of my head. In what areas am I expected to grow because of this class? What are the measurable points of success in this class? What skills should I have because of my two years in Design Studio and all the hours in team time?

The answers to these questions should be the same questions an interviewer should seek to discover in an interview. This would give the PM some structure to the interview. Facilitating a two-way discussion shouldn't be difficult as the PM asks a student how another team member is doing on a certain point of success. Really, we do that now in written form, so that isn't such a big leap.

Things like communication, leadership, diplomacy, handling tough situations, persuasiveness, and other good traits for the workplace are things we seek for now and are things we should continue. Identifying core values for a Design Studio student would be a key step. Putting more emphasis on goals would be easier in an interview since I don't think anybody pays much attention to those now.

Another issue with the current system is there close to no value of meeting with the PM after evals now. The PM usually sends the student a copy of the results of their evaluation about an hour or so (if that) before a meeting. Then the PM reads the review to you. There is no value in that. I can read. I would see more value out of my and my PM's time if we were actually discussing and poring over questions when the questions mattered to me most--ie, when things happen or shortly thereafter.

Well, those are my thoughts. Either way, I'm gone after this year, so no big deal :)

Project Management

Recently, a friend of mine sent me an invite to try out the beta of an application called Thymer. This Web application is a minimalistic project or task management tool with a natural, fluid, and simple interface. I absolutely love it so far. I'm using it to manage personal projects and tasks, similar to what you can do with The Hit List for Mac. To be honest, I haven't seen or looked for too many tools like this.

Things I like about Thymer:

• The Interface
  
  Again, I cannot stress enough how much I love using it. It's clean, simple, and very intuitive. They really take pride in their one-page design. If that sounds unique, it should because you literally do everything you need on one page.
  The other thing I like is that the interface is designed around one thing: managing tasks. The user's eyes are immediately drawn to the input bar and from there everything just makes sense. I don't remember all my fancy HCI terms, but this just reminds me of everything I learned in design class. The interface seriously makes me happy just using it. I'll shutup about this now.
  


• The syntax
  
  The simple way to use Thymer is to just type a task in and go. However, you can start pulling in many of its features with the "@" sign. With this and a few key words, you can assign tasks to a particular project, delegate to a person on your team, set a due date, and plenty of other things.
  


• Time tracking
  
  Being able to track time spent working on a particular task--especially if it's billable--is a cool feature to have. If used correctly, it can help an individual find out how they spend most of their day. It can also help a team manager see where the hours are going on a project. It can also be a useful estimation-training tool. I haven't investigated this feature much, so I can't really say more.
  


• Other little tricks
  
  I only got my invite to this last night, but I've already been using it quite a bit. The ability to set up multiple projects and arrange views by projects is nice. Being able to drag tasks around to designate priority is also a good feature. It is aware of date as a context and uses color and positioning to visually show you which tasks will be on time or may run late. Those that have already passed the due date show up in red. Assigning tasks to users could be useful for a team.
  

For the most part, I can see this as being useful on a personal level, but it also have been thinking about how this can be used for project management in the agile methodology. There are lots of discussions going on these days on how to make various things about our Design Studio program go better. We had Ron Jeffries in class today to review what was good and what was bad about our year of agile. The time we spent talking to him yesterday was pretty awesome too, but I digress.

We've been grumbling about VersionOne pretty much all year. There were some things I liked about the application, but I think it was fairly underutilized from what I could see. Some teams really bought into it, and others only used it at a bare minimum to make sure the powers that be were pleased. I can attempt to make a few guesses at why.

• The Interface
  
  VersionOne was cluttered. There was just so much going on in a given screen when all I want to do is grab stories or add tasks to my stories. With time and practice, VersionOne does become very navigable, but it pales in comparison with the ease of use in Thymer.
  


• Feature Overload
  As a team, the things we were concerned with were maintaining a backlog, managing stories, adding tasks to stories, and making estimates. As far as I can tell, that was it. VersionOne had nice things like burn-down chart generation, "how far behind you are" bars, and other reporting tools. We never used many of these things. Moreover, to my knowledge, our client rarely saw any of these things. Where's the value? After a while, all these things become gold plating and one really has to take a hard look and see if you're getting the return on every feature you paid for.


• Replace-ability
  
  Many software applications maintain physical metaphors and conventions to make usability more intuitive. In VersionOne's case, it was frustrating because you could kind of see where they were trying to do that, but I always felt like I could be just as productive with sticky-notes on a wall or some other simpler process. For all its glitz and glamor, VersionOne could have easily been replaced and I don't think anybody would have missed it. However, another part of the problem is that PMs and faculty can't see progress without VersionOne reports, so the teams are constrained to use a particular tool not because of its effectiveness, but because of policy. I'd take the sticky notes in a second.
  


• Mapping Policy to Use
  
  This one may not be VersionOne's fault at all, but I can remember how messy things were at the beginning of the year. Generating stories was one thing. Jamming them into a VersionOne backlog was another. Trying to figure out how many tasks to make up or how to break things down "just so" because the faculty might be grading something made it nearly impossible to map the value of a system to requirements for class. The point is this: a tool should mold to the needs of a team, and not the other way around. Too much time was spent trying to bend in unnatural ways to play nicely with VersionOne. Something like Thyme seems flexible enough that a team could adopt it naturally into its own way of doing things.
  

I didn't really plan this post before starting, so I apologize if it's not well structured. What started as a post about Thyme turned into a rant about VersionOne. However, I hope somebody finds this tool useful, and I hope we can take a good look on how our use of tools in Design Studio can be a natural, pleasant aid to a team instead of an encumbrance.

I grabbed this video from their site. Take a look at it if you want:

Color Scheme Change

Two posts within a day's time. This is plain craziness.

I do most of my blog reading in Google Reader, which is a fantastic blog aggregating service by the way. Therefore, I don't really get to see color schemes on a blog. Well I just spent some time reviewing older posts in my blog. After a while, I realized that while I loved my old dark color scheme, it was just terrible on my eyes after a while.

I did a Google search to see what color schemes are best for reading large amounts of text and a few sources confirmed my suspicion: light text on dark backgrounds is no good. I didn't spend much time verifying the credibility of these sources, but I really only needed some light confirmation to make me switch.

I think my current theme should be a bit better. If anybody actually follows this on blogspot, leave me a suggestion if you think my scheme (not my posts!) is damaging your eyes.

Twitter Schmitter

I decided to cave in and get on Twitter.

I really resisted this idea for the longest time thinking "this is useless. I don't see why this could be important to me at all."

To be honest, I still kind of think that way. I then realized many of the times I think something is stupid or useless, it is because I don't fully understand it. More importantly, I don't realize the potential.

Well today in Design Studio class, we had a guest speaker named Ron Woerner from TD AMERITRADE. I thought he was a pretty engaging speaker and, in my opinion, the technology oriented talks seem more interesting than the Agile talks or some other topic.

He gave us the quote "Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant." I thought that was pretty awesome. Being in college has really taught me a lot about gleaning as much information from every situation or circumstance. I often feel like a vacuum hungry to learn more. Over the last year, I've been seeing the value of being less parasitic and seeking ways to turn my 'input' into 'output'. This quote is kind of interesting because it denotes the concept of taking in a lot of input and generating a lot of input.

So what about Twitter? I think it can be a new way to get more information and learn more. Along the way, I'll probably end up seeing some of the useless stuff that made me avoid Twitter before, but I think that will be ok. It can also be a way for me to put some of my thoughts and experiences down, kind of like I'm doing with this blog.

Hopefully I can avoid making "zOMG I'm so DePrEsSeD right now I JUST ATE AN APPLE" tweets. ;)

You can follow me at TheDahv.

Resurrection of the blog

Well, I certainly let a lot of time go by on my blog, so I write now with remorse and shame. However, there's no time like the present to start back up so less whining and more writing.

The focus of this entry will be around a new project I threw together and some of the tools and methodologies going into it.

The Problem

To provide some background on what I'm doing, I should probably mention that this is a project for People's City Mission. I work there now (as in 'get paid') as a member of AmeriCorps. My title is kind of a catch-all position dubbed "Internet/Web Specialist." I'm not entirely sure what all goes into being an AmeriCorps member because I wasn't told much other than that I'd be getting paid after all that time volunteering.

Anyway, one of the great things about my role is that I pretty much have free reign to consult and help the organization make better use of its technology resources. It's a cool learning exercise because most of my training is in the academic or enterprise realm. In these domains, the technology environment is generally pretty solid and there are plenty of financial resources devoted to making it competitive. In the non-profit environment, this isn't always the case. Thus, I am challenged to think critically and find out how to do less with more.

One of my main goals there is to help them make their Web site more effective. To do so, I trained a few people on how to download a local copy of the site from the FTP server, make minor edits, and push the changes back to the server. Again, this isn't my preferred environment because there is no versioning. This created the problem of multiple people making changes to the same code base and over-writing the updates of others.

To fix this, I recommended implementing a change control system. I started by setting up a rudimentary e-mail process until I could get something better in place. Eventually, I would need a solution that would track all changes being made to the site's code base, track who was making those changes, and limit the ability to make changes to capable and trusted individuals.

The Solution

I did some investigating to see if there was an existing solution that would serve those needs. Additional criteria required that the solution would incur no costs, and that any hosting requirements would create as few snags as possible.

The first thing I found was that there weren't many hosted solutions available. Therefore, I opened up my search to open source solutions that I could run on a server located on-site. I figured I could use DynDns to make it accessible on and off-site.

I looked at a few alternatives, and Bugzilla and Trac were most ideal. Both are credible and widely-used issue-tracking solutions. However, my audience isn't necessarily tech savvy and much of the terminology and concepts used on each solution could have been a problem. I also saw that each had extra features that my problem didn't need, which could have been distracting or confusing to my audience.

Therefore, I decided to create my own. It seems like a simple enough problem, and a new coding project could be good for me. I looked into Ruby on Rails as a platform and I even started my project with it. However, I learned the MVC paradigm with Grails and I found myself thinking in those terms. My love for Grails ended up being tempting me enough to switch.

I think I'll be getting a server from People's City Mission, and I plan on putting Xubuntu on it and running the project from that. For now, I'm just prototyping on my laptop and hopefully I'll get something I can deploy to a server easily.

Other Tools

I did a lot of drawing on a marker board in my office at the Mission. I'm the type that likes to sketch things out and do some design work ahead of time so. I find this makes it a lot easier to throw concepts into code. I took some pictures of my work with my phone and decided later to get these ideas into digital form. For that, I looked online for some good diagramming tools and came up with Dia. This is kind of similar to Umbrello, but Dia doesn't force you into a UML paradigm. Instead, I could use any of its multiple sheets to visualize my ideas. This ended up being kind of fun and I was able to tease out some new features and eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies in my initial design.

Hopefully, this project turns into something useful for the people that work there. My main goal is to improve efficiency and make the process of keeping the Web site up to date and effective an activity in which everybody at the Mission could participate. Ideally, there should be enough interesting stuff coming from this project that I can write more about it instead of letting another three or four months go by before I post again.

Volunteer Opportunity

I saw this posted up on a wall on campus. UNL is providing an opportunity for students, teachers, and I don't know who else to help the less fortunate in our city with taxes. That doesn't sound terribly exciting, does it?

I think it's a cool opportunity, because my university is doing something to offer free tax assistance to those who need it and maybe didn't know it was available. Volunteers train and become certified to become tax assistants and will help families when that dreaded time comes around. I signed up and I think I'm going to find time to help out. If anything, I'll learn more about how to do my own taxes!

Here is the link: http://involved.unl.edu/eitc

I don't think the time line on this moves pretty quickly, so act now if you are remotely interested.

On another note, I posted a Brett Dennen song in my last entry. The video that follows is of a song that I've known and liked for a while, but I never actually made it through the whole video. I just finished watching it, and it's pretty powerful. I don't like the idea of guilting people into doing something, but this at least shows us how oblivious we can be to the world around us when we become wrapped up in our blessings. It's kind of neat to watch, and it's a great song.



Ok, it's Friday, and I'm going to relax.

Giving and receiving the love

I've touched on it briefly before, but one of my biggest kicks since this summer is cultivating a passion for doing something to make the world around me a better place. That may seem fairly daunting to many people--myself included. I made a comment on another friend's blog after he touched on the issue. There is this concept that something needs to start somewhere for any movement to happen. Oftentimes, it seems the initial spark is the one that requires the greatest courage to accomplish. The absolutely essential part is that it requires action. It requires a commitment to an ideal. It requires doing something before change can occur. I find we have certainly accomplished greatness in complaining about oppression or poverty or hatred--you name it, and we're probably good at complaining about it.

It reminds me of the character Pip in "Great Expectations." In one scene, he and his friend go through their accounts and record all their debts. In doing so, they made themselves feel much better about the debt they incurred. Interestingly enough, they never actually paid off their debt, but rather were satisfied in merely acknowledging them. However, acknowledgment doesn't pay bills. Likewise, if we have grown complacent in merely talking or complaining about things we dislike in the world, not a lot gets done.

So I suppose a big part of it is having the eyes to see what needs to change, and having the hands to make it happen. Interestingly enough, people carry different versions of what the "right" world looks like. So that could make quite an interesting scenario if everybody is applying their efforts in different directions. I suppose this is where things like tolerance, empathy, and understanding come into play. I personally take most of my direction in the things I find to be absolute in my life. I recognize not all of my friends or whoever may be reading this share my beliefs, and I don't dare force mine upon anybody. However, lately I've actually been committing to my faith and learning about the character of God in order to better emulate it. The common thing I see so far is overwhelmingly the issue of love. If there really is a God, and if He really does love me, why shouldn't I share that? This love can apply to things like compassion, tolerance, and standing against oppression and hatred. I don't know if this is a stark contrast to an opinion of the Christian faith as one of judgment and fear. Frankly, I don't know what the prevailing views on Christianity are today. The Christianity I subscribe to lately has been the one that encourages me to share the love I see in my life. This is my motivation. This is how I see what I think needs to change.

That being said, I don't argue that a lack of God or faith precludes a person from exhibiting love. To be honest, I know lots of people who are just as passionate about helping others who don't share the same views I do.

Moving on, it would probably be a good idea to "walk my talk" as it were? What have I been doing in response to the passions that have been rising in me since this past Summer? Well lately I've been getting down to People's City Mission in Lincoln. This is an organization that is committed to serving the poor and homeless of Lincoln. This was a fantastic find for me because it is a great venue to give something of myself in a scenario that aligns well with my passions. Most of the work I do is helping them manage their IT and database systems. I found a great opportunity to use my education and skills I've been developing over the last few years to help them focus on doing what they do best and not fighting with the computer. I helped them cut what used to take weeks worth of work into about 10 minutes when dealing with data.

Another cool project I get to be a part of is helping to organize the "Run for the Homeless" set to take sometime in the Spring of '09. It's a pretty big project ahead of me, but I'm so excited to get a chance to be involved at this age.

One of the exciting things I saw in this whole experience is that there are so many ways to contribute just a little bit and make huge impacts. It also goes to show that all of us can find something we have to offer and turn it into something useful. The classic mold of helping at a homeless shelter is serving in the kitchen or taking out trash. Throw that mold away. Don't put a "you must be this tall to ride" sign on your efforts. Anything helps, doesn't it?

So the point of this post wasn't to create a self-righteous "look at me" sentiment. Rather, I hope it goes to show you that we can all find a motivation to make the world around us a better place. We can all find some way to return the things we were given to do something good for others. Finally, it isn't that difficult to find a way to help. The opportunities are all around us.

Ok, enough of my talking. These songs and artists are awesome and show a much more entertaining way to say what I'm talking about.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading: