Re: RFC: Organizational Changes – Engineering Service

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Fri Feb 5 21:21:38 UTC 2010


On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> The obvious flaw here is “will people volunteer?” I think they would.  I
> know I will.

This is very good...and its straight out of the volunteer coordination
handbook I was pimping a few FPL's back.

A few comments.

When people sign up... don't just ask for hours a week.. ask for a
specific long term time commitment...like a 6 month tour of duty.
Make a huge deal out of new people signing up for their first tour of
duty. Make a huger deal of team veterans reaffirming their role as
engineering task monkey for additional tours.  Since this team is a
service team and won't be as self-directed..its important to shift the
reward balance to overt recognition.  We tend to reward our current
volunteers groups with self-directed control of their area of work and
we can't do that effectively for a service team that reports to fesco.

Also...try to communicate the initial skillset needed in the team. If
fesco could sort of roadmap what they think they'd like to see built
in say the next 6 months...break that down into anticipated skills and
manhours.. you can try to recruit for that anticipated need to fill in
the skill gaps for a new project.  You can't anticipate all desirable
skills and experience ahead of all possible tasking of course. But you
want to recruit a certain baseline of experience and keep the tasking
inside that skillset pool as much as you can. Big new tasks with
unanticipated skill needs can be pushed back into the next tour of
duty and highlighted in a recruitment call-to-arms.

And...along the way create some opportunities to broaden the skillset
of team members. A service team like this could be the perfect target
for specialized team members only classroom skills training.

-jef


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