Sharing Workshop Process and Best Practices
Noticing inefficiencies and finding opportunities to help.
BACKGROUND
Argonne is organized by directorates (like colleges in universities) and divisions (like schools within a college). Our directorate was recently reorganized and staff has experienced some pain points, typically common with change. A computational scientist from another division in the directorate asked for my help to promote their first event. As he slowly continued asking me for more help, it occurred to me that a consistent process for handling events was not in place under the new reorganization. The researcher had no idea how to host an onsite workshop or what he needed to communicate to support staff so they could do their job.
APPROACH
The ALCF hosts several onsite workshops and webinars every year to train users. Over the years, we've gathered our checklists and best practices to easily reproduce our workshops. On top of documented processes, we have templates to reuse for attendee messaging and can easily create copies of existing workshop web pages instead of starting from scratch.
I saw this as an opportunity to share our best practices and practice putting a user-centered process in place for the directorate. I didn’t want technology to get in the way, so I decided to use our document management software, Box, to setup a low barrier of entry for staff to execute. With Box, you can make a master folder and make instances from it. I then held a “Tech Talk” to share the new process with research and administrative staff.
We are planning our first workshop since the new process has been available to staff. I’m collecting feedback and look forward to refining.
RESULTS
planning schedule
A reverse engineered approach is needed to ensure there is enough time to complete all necessary tasks. Due to Argonne’s status as a DOE national lab, all visitors must be approved and badged before entry and anyone that is a foreign national must submit official government documents before granted access. Target dates must be hit, otherwise you risk the chance of registrants not being able to attend.
questionnaire for Host instructions
There are several things to consider when planning an onsite event that are not obvious to someone who spends their day with computer programming models. A few questions we ask are:
Did you book a conference room?
What are your goals?
Do you have an agenda?
Do participants need supercomputer accounts?
Do you need a photographer?
Logistics checklist
The logistics checklist provides a way to track “who’s on first.” It is a way to make sure event details aren’t missed.
Agenda template
A major thorn in everyone’s side was the agenda. Research staff need to be able to share and collaborate with their colleagues on the agenda. Support staff need to be able to provide printed copies of the agenda to attendees. There is also the desire to make the agenda available on a web page, but support staff aren’t trained to do HTML code and researchers are typically too busy to mess with it.
By using a Box note as a template, everyone is happy. Researchers can collaborate, support staff can export as a PDF, and, since it is a web-based application, you can copy and paste the table onto a web page without any coding. It also provides an option to cut and paste into Word to allow more customizations, like adding banner images, changing fonts, etc.
messaging templates
The ALCF communications team has message templates written for almost every need. I used Box notes as a way to share typical messaging needed to host an event, starting with promotions and ending with thanking guest speakers.
Tech talk presentation to share process and Best practice
My original goal was to make this available to researchers knowing that they would appreciate the “reprogrammable” workshop and hope for a slow adoption due to the simplicity. I thought I’d work out the kinks with the researchers and then offer the process to the COO and support staff supervisor.
However, luckily, the supervisor attended my presentation and we met a few days later so I could help her problem solve how to create copies of workshop from a single master file. This allows her to make incremental changes to her master and gives her a way to easily roll out the changes with the next workshop that comes along.