Paul schantz-csuci-web-presentation
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How I Built an Effective Web Team at CSUN. Paul discusses how he made some of the decisions that led him to build a highly productive web team with very few resources at a large University.
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Paul schantz-csuci-web-presentation
- 1. How I Built an Effective Web Team at CSUN Presented by: Paul Schantz, Director SAIT California State University, Northridge Presentation for EduSoCal ’13 CSU Channel Islands Tuesday, May 21, 2013
- 3. Paul Schantz Director, Web & Technology Services Division of Student Affairs at CSUN Started in 2006 About Me
- 4. From 1997, I worked in Fortune 50 Some of the things I did there Working with the business Prior to CSUN
- 5. What I was hired to do Started from ground zero What I Walked Into at CSUN
- 6. All organizations are different YMMV Before I Begin
- 7. Every organization has them… What I found at CSUN Step 1: Identify Gaps
- 8. First, start small Find doers Always, ALWAYS under-promise, and over-deliver Brag a little Step 2: Get Tactical
- 9. Some interesting projects NSO cost savings of $50K Wins under your belt will clue you in Step 2: Get Tactical (continued)
- 10. Look at your problem space What to do? What model made the most sense? What Do Other Successful Teams Do?
- 11. Similarities Uncertainty is hard to do Web Startups
- 12. Immediate, tangible results Focus Wherefore Iteration?
- 13. Creeping success is a killer You already know this part… Don’t Kill the Goose
- 14. Conventions matter It’s cool to build things Talk to your stakeholders! Convey Excitement!
- 15. Whatever happened to that CMS? No effort is wasted if you did it with love Epilogue
Hinweis der Redaktion
- My session description was a little ambitious, so I apologize if I don’t cover everything you came to hear. Please feel free to ask me any questions you like. Presentation is posted at SlideShare: URLMy twitter handle: @paulschantz This info will be posted at the end of the presentation as well.
- Paul SchantzCurrently, Director of Web & Technology Services in the Division of Student Affairs at CSUNStarted there in 2006, just had my seven-year anniversary
- Prior to working at CSUN, from 1997, I worked at two Fortune 50 Corporations,WellPoint Health NetworksCountrywideYou might say that I watched the dot-com boom and bust from the perch of nice large organizations. While there, my primary responsibilities included managing web properties using content management systems. Most of my experience was with multi-million dollar installations of Interwoven’s “TeamSite” and “OpenDeploy” products, but I also did a little work with Ektron. I also did several years of web design with your normal HTML and CSS, and did web development working with Microsoft Active Server Pages and Microsoft Sequel Server, IBM WebSphere portal, Java Server Pages, and little bit of servlet development. The last few years of my work there was very much tied into the business side of the organizations, and had less to do with development and more to do with management, measurement, and working with people.
- I was hired as a web manager by the then-director of Student Affairs IT to start a web team. At the time, the team was made up of myself, my hiring director, and two desktop support techs. My hiring director brought me on because I had experience working with Content Management Systems, so I was tasked with identifying one for a pilot in Student Affairs at CSUN. What followed was a SWOT analysis of the campus itself, along with detailed research into what content management systems would fit our capabilities and budget. For the first several months, I was a team of one, and my director gave me the time and space I needed to get familiar with the campus, while introducing me to all the folks I’d need to know. This time was very important, because it gave me an opportunity to get acquainted with how CSUN works. Now, I’ll tell you a little more about where that content management system project went in a little bit, but I’m going to switch gears because the selection of a web content management system is not really the heart of what I want to talk to you about.
- Universities – like all large organizations - operate differently from each other.It’s important to remember that what I did at CSUN that worked is probably a bit different from what might work at your institution.YMMV!
- Chances are good that there are gaping holes in capacity or capability at nearly any institution. higher ed or otherwise. The identification of gaps gives you a pretty good idea about what you might be able to do. At CSUN, I had a lot to work with…this list is not all-inclusive:- Student Affairs was burdened with outdated web sites that had largely been built and maintained by student assistants.- There was a complete lack of visual consistency. No joke: depending on the department, the CSUN wordmark was literally in each of four corners.- Lack of measurement and analytics – nobody really knew what was effective, so this led to decisions made largely on personal preferences. The example I like to use is the (fictitious) picture of the leader and their dog, followed by an essay welcoming the hapless visitor to their department’s web site. Sadly, this wasn’t much of an exaggeration.- Poorly maintained web infrastructure that didn’t support much in the way of commonly used web programming and emerging frameworks.- No coherent campus web development team to speak of.- One thing we did have was a Central IT division with a large PeopleSoft / Oracle implementation. This team had a list of more than sixty projects in their queue. The reality was that most of the projects we wanted to do in Student Affairs were never going to crack the top 10 of that list, much less get worked on. That’s just a short accounting of the gaps we had. You might say that pretty much anything we did was going to be an improvement.
- First, start small. Identify a low-risk, high-reward project that will “put you on the map.” In our case, it was a simple redesign of our Prospective Students web site. I hired a web designer who I knew and trusted would get the job done, while also being patient with our stakeholders. We used analytics to help drive the conversation about the redesign. I’ll be honest, even with mountains of data it was a pretty hard sell. Nobody had ever used web analytics in Student Affairs before…much less A/B split testing! Find doers. One triple-A web developer is worth their weight in gold. Chances are good that there’s one lurking somewhere in your organization. Get to know them. Polyglots in particular tend to be able to view what many see as problems, as opportunities, and can see many sides of an argument. These kinds of devs will probably have strong philosophies and opinions, but generally won’t pigeonhole things. You need someone like this who can help provide guidance. If you can, bribe or beg them to help you. Always, ALWAYS under promise, and over deliver. You need to build credibility, so be sure not to bite off more than you can chew. Small successes are good, especially if you can consistently deliver. Brag a little. Be sure that people know what you’re doing. Talk about how your project makes people’s lives easier. Maybe it saves time, saves money, streamlines a process, or provides insight. Use these elements as part of your “sales pitch” when you talk about things that ought to be done.
- Using these tactics, I tackled a number of interesting projects: Online registration systems for our Testing Center and New Student Orientation program. The NSO project alone has saved $50,000 over the last five years.Built a web feedback widget and implemented across all Student Affairs web propertiesBuilt an RSS feed managerBuilt a couple Flash gamesBuilt a working mockup of what we thought a student portal should look like and pitched it to our Vice President. That’s why CSUN has the student portal it has today.…and more. If you’re thinking “that’s a lot of stuff to work on,” you’re right. I’ll get to that in a minute. Once you have a few real wins under your belt, you’ll probably have a better idea about what’s actually possible within your organization. At this point, I only had ONE designer and ONE developer, plus a few student assistants.
- Look at the problem space you have and ask a lot of questions:Based on your gap analysis and some tactical work, how much work do you see that needs to be done, both now and in the future?What does your budget look like?Can it grow through the possible sale of a product you can build?What about the creative use of grants and foundation accounts?What staffing profile do you have?Can you accomplish what you need with full time staff only?Can you do it with student assistants?Are consultants an option?What kind of growth can you realistically achieve within your organization?Is it possible to influence teams in other organizations? In my situation, CSUN already had a Central IT division. If I grew my team too big, I’d probably be viewed as a threat and wouldn’t be able to get the services I needed. I also couldn’t provide services they already provided, that would be a ridiculous duplication of efforts. I stepped back and took a hard look at organizations that had similar profiles and problems. Would anyone care to take a guess where I took my model from?
- Web startups. Web startups tend to have very few employees, small amounts of funding (often bootstrapped), and are geared to accomplish something specific. Their entire approach and philosophy flows from those facts. Whenever possible, they tend to use products and processes that help them to build useful things faster, including: Cloud-based services like Amazon Web Services and githubOpen source softwareCoding frameworks where appropriateConvention over configurationOpen work environmentsAgile and iterative processesUse of tools that generally do one thing very well Unfortunately, the startup mentality is often at odds with large organizations because it embraces uncertainty. Sometimes that’s hard to reconcile. Questions about how things get done are answered in fundamentally different ways, such as “How long do we work?” Answer: until the money runs out.
- When you use an iterative process, you work only on those things that produce immediate tangible and measurable benefits for the stakeholder. What that means is that you’re not throwing the kitchen sink into your plans, so can focus on what matters right now. When iterating, project stakeholders often don’t even know what they’re going to be working on three weeks from now, much less in six months. That’s actually viewed as a GOOD THING. This approach helps you focus on what’s important. If you as a technologist adopt this philosophy, you’ll find that saying “no” is a little easier. If you do a good job working with your stakeholders and they adopt this philosophy, they’ll be clear on what matters most and will actually start saying “no” for you. It’s a beautiful thing when that happens.
- I kind of gave away the answer to this slide already, but if you decide on using an agile process and it hasn’t caught on like wildfire, this slide is still relevant. When you have a history of a lot of small wins, it’s easy to get into a routine where you find yourself saying “yes” a lot to progressively larger projects. If your team is composed of doers, they’re probably willing to work themselves to the point of burnout. If they actually like your leadership, they’ll tell you that you’re killing them before they get to that point.I was fortunate to have a team that did this for me, when I got my very own “coming to Jesus” moment at the Chili’s restaurant on Reseda Avenue. There’s really no secret here. Trust your staff and treat them like professionals. Allow them to come up with their own solutions. Chances are good that their solutions will be better than yours. They’ll spread the word about how you run your team for you. This will hopefully help you attract new talent.
- One of the events I used to go to was O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. At that event, there were speakers from the tech giants you’d expect, plus dozens of startups whose home offices were just blocks from the Moscone Center. They typically opened their doors to attendees for Meetups. These conferences were filled with people excited about technology who were actually building the services we’re using today. Today, I’d argue that this excitement has been usurped by Google I/O. I know it’s hard to justify budger for some of these events, but you don’t go to them to hang out with the cool kids…you go there to find out what’s next and to get yourself excited about technology so you can bring it back to your own organization. With any luck, you might even get some traction on a pilot project or two. Being able to deliver a product or service that makes people’s lives just a little bit easier is something I personally love doing, and it turns out that a lot of other people get excited by that too. That’s an inherently cool thing to do. Talk to your stakeholders and involve them in the creative process. Ask them what kinds of things they’d like to do. I promise you they have tons of good ideas and are a lot more sophisticated than you give them credit for.
- What happened with the Content Management System I was supposed to select and pilot? Well, the campus at the time was using Contribute, which had a number of people using it, but it had hardly “caught fire,” as they say. After looking at that project and its huge scope and political barriers, I realized that it was not going to succeed as a divisional project. I let it go. However, the work was not lost. Ultimately, the analysis and research ended up becoming the technical scope section for the system-wide web content management system RFP that was issued by the Chancellor’s Office.